Fit but not fast?

I've got a friend who recently moved from Los Angeles to Portland, an unashamed bikerace-mad follower of all that is great and good about anything slightly related to high quality racing in any discipline. He raced BMX as a youngster, worked for some of the worlds finest professional mountain bike teams, and what he doesn't know about Pro Tour road racing and the guys who do it, well even with big writing you could get it on the back of a stamp.
But he's never done cyclocross. He reads about it, knows more about Sven Nys than Mrs Nys does and is probably a member of the fan club, but until he moved to Portland he hadn't actually lined up for a race. So I sent him a bike over (he needed something that would score him good euro points...), he trained like a demon... and got his ass kicked.

Now my friend is a fit guy; he trains hard and with a coaching background he knows what he is doing. He takes good care of himself, does his split session days, rests properly, works on his technical skills on a 'cross circuit, and I'll be impressed if the majority of the people that beat him at his first couple of races are anywhere close to having the physical condition and focus that he has.

But he is losing time during the 40 minutes that his category race for and he is frustrated, so we had a chat on the phone after last weekends race and the majority of the chat focussed on what we ended up calling the "transition" sections of the course, as it appears this is where he is struggling.
We termed these transition sections as anywhere on the course that you have to lose speed, so a set of hurdles, a run-up, a set of consecutive tight slow corners, anywhere that breaks your rythm, forces you to brake, or naturally loses you speed. Now the actual 'cross technique might be very good in that he is lined up for corners correctly, he picks his bike up for the hurdles, can shoulder it fast for the run-ups, but its the section immediately after that where he is not getting back up to speed quickly enough that is losing him time. If you approach a set of hurdles at 25kph and exit them at 18kph then you need to get back to 25kph as quickly as you can, the same goes for a corner or a run-up or even a section into a headwind. Get back to your optimum speed pronto.
Now although some of this is a fitness related issue in that you need to accelerate hard out of the saddle for a few revs to pick the speed back up and that takes some specific training, its more about realising that you need to do it. Its easy to wait a couple of revs after a section or a remount before you launch yourself off your chair and into action but that will be a second or two lost, and if you figure that on a typical lap there are probably a minimum of five of these transition sections then 10 seconds a lap turns into a minute in a six lap race.
So if you are training hard and dont think that your race results quite match your level of fitness spend some time thinking about where you lose time, especially where people nip past you. If its before these sections then its probably technique (late braking, correct line), the need for more recovery (trying to get a couple of breaths in freewheeling before the corner/sandpit/run-up), fear (approaching hurdles too fast gotta scrub some speed off), or simply not concentrating.
If its after a section then see above; come out of of it and hit it hard to get back up to speed, only then can you sit on a wheel and get a quick recovery.
Finally if people are getting past you during the section, its likely to be technique at race-speed which is letting you down.

It'll be interesting if my friend starts to move up the result list without necessarily getting any fitter but simply by using his fitness in a different way and mentally tuning in to where and when he needs to use the big efforts. I'll keep you posted...