As a proud sponsor of MM Racing, we were excited to see that while Mo Bruno Roy was cleaning up and making the podium at this past weekend’s Jingle Cross in Iowa, the other half of MM Racing, endurance racer and chief of the MM racing pit crew Matt Roy, got some accolades and attention from Podium Insight. Along with his duties as a part of MM Racing, Matt is a PhD candidate at Harvard Medical School, he also wrenches for the Cannondale p/b Cyclocrossworld.com team, working for Stu Thorne.
Lyne Lamoureux of Podium Insight asked Matt some important questions, about racing in the US versus racing in Europe, what it’s like to be in the pits at various races around the country, and from the pit crew’s perspective, what are the key elements to having a successful race. Typical of Matt, his responses were both enlightening and funny!
Lyne asked Matt for some tales from the pit:
“This isn’t super funny but I see Marianne Vos’ dad in the pit a lot. He speaks Flemish and essential no English but he’s just the friendliest guy, we always smile and say hello. Marianne flatted and he didn’t have enough air in one of her tires, I offered him my air pump but it was in PSI and he uses BAR, and I didn’t have a smartphone at the time, and I couldn’t do the conversion for him for whatever 1.8 bar was. So the two of us were using pantomime to try to figure out what psi and trying to estimate what bar… it was just a funny little bit of lost in translation. He ended just getting a hand pump from somebody.”
Matt also provided some insight into his learning curve as to essentials needed in the pit:
“I don’t bring everything. If you saw what I brought to the pit in the first National Championships compared to what I bring now, I have pared down dramatically. I always bring a pair of shoes for Mo, that’s a worst case scenario if she loses a shoe in the mud, I can give her a new shoe. That’s one totally excessive thing that I still stick with. We have two bikes, and sometimes we have three. You shouldn’t have to do major repairs, and those major repairs only in case of crashes because you have faith in your equipment going in, you know you shouldn’t have to worry about something coming loose. It’s typically mud or crashes. So for me, I always bring my airgun and I also bring lube and a towel because you don’t want to grab a bike with wet handlebars.”
Click here for more of this interesting and informative interview with Matt Roy, and good luck to MM Racing this weekend at NBX Gran Prix of Cross 2011 in Warwick, Rhode Island!