The Grand National Cross Country (GNCC) ATV season is going Bill Ballance’s way. On Saturday, June 11, he earned his fourth win in eight rounds at Summersville, West Virginia and now holds a sizable 18-point lead over key rival Chris Borich in the championship.
Ballance actually led all five laps of “The Mountaineer” event, but victory wasn’t as easy as the statistics suggest. After Ballance opened up a comfortable 33-second margin by the end of Lap 1, Borich made up 32 of those seconds on Lap 2, and the pair fought hard for the duration of the event, never deviating by more than a few seconds at the end of each lap.
The suspense went right down to the last lap, when Ballance pulled out a five-second gap over Borich to finally seal the win, with Chris Jenks finishing another two minutes behind in third.
“My YFZ450 ran awesome. We pulled another holeshot and led just about all the race,” said Ballance, the defending AMA National GNCC Champion, afterwards. “I had a pretty good battle with Chris Borich on the third and fourth laps, but I’ve been training hard and I am pretty confident. Everything went our way this weekend and I feel like I got the best of him.”
