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ALEX MARTIN
250 MX / 6TH
IMAGE / LANNAN WORDS / HARNISHFEGER DESIGN / MOTOPLAYGROUND
>> Alex Martin has emerged as a true and complete title contender here in 2018. He has showed ashes of this potential over the past few seasons but now eight rounds into the series, he is sitting second place in points. Despite this, it has also been a very frustrating season for the Millville, Minnesota native. He has yet to win a moto or an overall victory this year despite leading countless numbers of laps. He has led motos various times only to throw them away with crashes and misfortune. All this has contributed to his forty- nine-point de cit behind Aaron Plessinger. After falling short of the victory in front of his home-town crowd last weekend at Millville, Martin looked to came out ring at Washougal in an attempt to chip away at Plessinger’s large lead. Martin did not have the best of times in the morning qualifying practice sessions, but they certainly weren’t bad. He put in the ninth fastest lap time of the class and was just a tick off the top group. Martin has been around long enough to know which adjustments to make so he fully expected to get out there and contend in the motos. Martin began his day with a bit of a downer after suffer- ing a bad start. He was buried in the eld and emerged out of lap one in thirteenth place. He did a great job of making moves in the next few laps though. He hopped into tenth on lap two and then passed Enzo Lopes and Mitchell Harrison on lap three to assume eighth position from them. Here he linked up to a freight train of riders that had Justin Cooper right ahead of him. He led in with them and despite being so close to the riders ahead of him and the riders that came up behind him, he did not gain or lose a spot the remainder of the moto. Everyone was on such a similar pace, so he would have to accept the eighth- place nish. That is de nitely not where he wants and needs to be, so he would have to go out and have a better second moto. Martin started the second moto better but would have a very similar race to the one he had in the rst. He was locked into a freight train
of riders and found it dif cult to pass. He shadowed Harrison for just over half the moto before nally being able to pass him for sixth. He just could not nd many lines or room to make passes and that would be as far as he would go in the moto. he’d nish with a healthy sixth place in both the moto and the overall because that is what his 8-6 moto scores would earn him. An off day for the title contender and he is lucky he only lost ten points to Plessinger who also had a relatively shaky day, although he did manage to win the overall. The points de cit now sits at fty-nine with just three rounds remaining.
22 GRITMOTO • JULY 29, 2018