On The Pegs July 2020 - Volume 5 - Issue 7 | Page 67

On The Pegs VOL. 4 ISSUE 7 - July 2020
67
Russell said after the race, “It was the craziest, scariest
crash I’ve ever had,” as he iced his ankle in a lawn
chair.
“Josh was riding really good,” added Russell. “I
couldn’t make up a lot of time on him. I had a couple
spots where I would kind of reel in on him because
I was really flowing in the rutty stuff. I had a spot
picked out where I made the pass the lap before and
it was really hard to see, so I didn’t know if he would
find the line. So, I was trying to stay right on him
so when we got there I could make the pass. I was
pushing hard and we come out of the woods, then
we turned left onto a road at the bottom. The berm,
I got in the fluff and my bars knifed and I endoed
over the bars and there was a fence on my righthand
side. So, it threw me into the fence. My bike
almost flipped over it. This is like a six-foot-tall fence.
I hit it so hard, my chest was stuck between the post
and the mesh fence. I was stuck like a fish wedged
in-between this fence and fence post. My bike was
on my head, spinning.”
Grant Baylor grabbed his first GNCC podium for
FactoryONE Sherco with a third. As usual, Baylor had
to come from outside the top-10 to get the job done.
“I may have been a little over a minute behind the
lead group there at one point,” said Baylor. “But once
I started putting my head down on about lap three, I
got started getting pit boards saying I was a minute
off of the podium. So I put my head down there and
put in a good charge mid-race and was able to get
around Layne (Michael) and FMF/KTM’s Josh Toth
there on the next-to-last lap there to move my way
into third. It was a weird terrain. It was almost like a
mud race/sand race. It was super-fast sand sections
that you could just rail the sand berms, and then