Run in two 10-lap legs with a break in between to allow workers to repair the hole-riddled surface, the race would be scored as an aggregate of the finishes in each leg. Chris chased Joe Kopp in leg one until one of the many holes wrenched his left foot sideways and twisted his knee. On the very next lap he twisted the knee even further, and was forced to ride feet-up throughout the remainder of the night, making his fifth and second placed results more impressive. Aggregate results placed Chris second overall and even more comfortably secure in the points, as both Jay Springsteen and J.R. Schnabel were behind him.

"First of all I want to apologize to everybody for getting this update tardy anyhow, or getting it up late, I had twisted my knee up in Seattle and pretty much ignored my webmaster as far as getting calls back to him and explaining to everybody what happened, but I went and got checked out on the Monday following the Seattle race, after I had driven down to Stockton, California where I've been hanging out, and was diagnosed with a tear in my medial collateral ligament on my left knee. So the doctors pretty much told me that I needed to give it two or three weeks rest and I said 'yeah, right, that's not going to happen, I'll give you the two or three weeks in about a month.' So I put a call into CTI and had a knee brace delivered by Wednesday and pretty much rested the leg as best I could and got ourselves ready for Sacramento Mile.

"As far as Seattle went, the race went pretty well under the circumstances, in the first leg I was running up in front with Joe Kopp and I proceeded to stuff my knee in a hole going into turn three on about the third lap. Figuring that it hurt a little bit but not too bad, I proceeded to stuff into the same hole a lap later and then it really hurt. So, I had backed off the pace a little bit trying to get through the first leg just to finish the ten laps and I rode around with my leg up around the handlebars so that it wouldn't get anywhere near the ground. We soldiered on to a fifth place in that leg. During the break in the action while they groomed the race track, I got out the roll of duct tape and taped up my knee as best I could and made it as solid as I could and went out and we had a pretty good run on the second leg. I had to ride around basically not putting my foot down and I looked for the smoothest lines possible around the race track and we were able to move up from fifth to second by the end of the race and had a good battle going with Gary Rogers the last couple of laps and I was able to prevail on that one and Kopp was pretty much gone at that point - he rode his Supertracker real well and deserved the win and we were ecstatic to finish second."

Was the track better or worse than you expected?

"The track was actually a little bit better than I expected. I didn't race there in 1999 but I did go to the inaugural Hot Shoe race in 1998 and the conditions then were deplorable. I would have to say to rate this track it was probably 10 times better than it was in 1998 - but to ride a traditional style National with 25-lap main events with 18 guys...I don't think it will ever happen in Seattle with the current dirt that they have - it's a synthetic type surface and I figure if you can't grow anything in it, it ain't going be worth a darn for us to race on. We were able to ride around on it, but to run a traditional style race I don't think it will ever happen with that type of dirt."