I met Hollis after the race for the first time while going over the damage to his bike, it was left in a nasty way and so was his thumb. Hollis was hopeful of racing the Conondale round of the AORC this coming weekend bit was not sure if he would make it at the time due to his injury.
In a turn of good luck , probably the first good luck he has had this season after talking to him, the Conondale round of the AROC has been postponed, giving the KTM rider some extra time to heal.
Back to the event - once the field spread out a little, things were not so bad, but still dry and still hard to see if anyone was directly in front of year. It was certainly a race where being out by yourself was a bonus.
Its actually funny how in a race with over 322 machines on the same course you can spend minutes at a time not seeing another rider, quite a weird feeling to be honest.
Though the dust was bad, at least we didn't see scenes like the below videos taken during a Enduro race in the United States earlier this year
As we know Toby Price won the event for the third year in a row and with the amount of coverage the race gets locally in Mildura I doubt anyone who lives or was visiting Mildura over the Hattah Weekend would not now know why Toby Price is!
Price and his number one KTM were spread across the back page of the local paper every day I was in Mildura, three to four days of full page coverage for the desert king and not just one page either, many times getting coverage on the front and back page as well as getting decent coverage through the sports second.
Even more surprising was getting back home to Adelaide and seeing a commercial with dirt bikes in it, watching the commercial to the end I found out it was a commercial for tourism in Mildura, the Hatta event and off road motorbike racing is used as a draw card to the area, Is Mildura the best city in Australia or what.
Doing the clubman class I only got to witness Price fly past me once this year, I didn't even hear him coming, he was on me and gone before I could blink.
I checked through my go pro footage to see where he past me and how he did it, I'll edit it and post it some time in the future but it was amazing to watch, he passes me around the out side of a corner coming onto a short deep sandy straight and blows by two other riders on the inside entering the next corner and is then gone. Truly amazing.
The other big thing to note about the Hattah Desert race is how big it has become spectator wise, the start of the race is amazing, racing past hundreds if not thousands of spectators that line the track for the first few kilometres, then the amount of people wondering along side of the 37km loop throughout the day is a sight to be seen.
