HISTORIC ACHIEVEMENT BY MAX

NEWS Friday 31st January 2014, 1:53pm

by Mike Hunter

  Edinburgh Monarchs

With his successful defence of his Australian Under-21 Championship, Max Fricke became the seventh rider to win this title more than once.

He joins Leigh Adams, Darcy Ward, Chris Holder, Rory Schlein, Ryan Sullivan and Travis McGowan. Without being certain of the precise dates of all the meetings, it looks like only Ward and Adams won the title at a younger age, and only Darcy won his second title younger than Max!

When we called to get some comments after the victory at Gillman, Max was resting from his second meeting in two days and his dad Rodger spoke on his behalf.

“It was great for Max, I think the final was even better than last year. He’s worked quite hard, especially on his gating over the summer.”

Max had some team support to call on: “Justin Sedgmen came along for the night. The team spirit should be good this year – Justin’s always been a supporter of Max over the years.”

Max will be the first of our overseas riders to arrive, and he is planning to be on a bike before the team practise on 21st March.

“Max will be travelling over on February 16th, he has quite a bit to do.

“Max will get his bikes ready then hopes to do a bit of riding in Denmark, then the development thing he is doing in Torun in March.”

Unlike last year Max hopes to contest the World Under-21 stages, though it might depend on the draw. “I hope he will get a spot in the Under-21 round at Leicester, we don’t have a lot of family money behind us and it would be difficult to travel anywhere else.”

Max does talk about that final Under-21 heat on his website. “It was still wide open as any one of us could have won the final but Nick was the obvious favourite. It was another very exciting race. Nick’s starts had been fantastic all night and this was no exception.

“He got the jump from the gate but went wide looking for the dirt on the outside of the first turn which allowed me to cut back and take the lead which I held for two laps. Nick and I raced close for a thrilling race and he managed to get passed briefly on the third lap coming into turn 3 before I again passed Nick coming off turn 4 and I held the race lead to the finish line.

“Unfortunately for Nick, he found heaps of drive coming off the last corner whilst running second and flipped his bike falling off 20 metres from the finish line and this allowed Ryan and Jack to take second and third.”

Commitments permitting Max will be back for Monarchs’ second winter Video Night on 28th February (Thomas Morton Hall) and for the Edinburgh Speedway History Night at Meggetland on 14th March.

The latter event is proving very popular with the initial allocation of tickets already sold out. More will be made available shortly.