Well..... Mallory Park at Easter seems a long while ago..... Maybe that's because it was !
I havnt updated the blog for ages now..... Apologies..... But a few months of illness and other pressures have meant I have not really had the time nor inclination to update if I was brutally honest !
We had a successful test day in early April, with the main changes to the scooter being the new paint job, a new Guy Topper designed and built exhaust, and a new Dellorto carb. A few other changes included a new Jahspeed race seat which looks great !
So....... With gearing modified with what was learnt on test day it should be close to spot on..... Which it was.
unfortunately in the run up to Mallory I had a very stressfulntime and was feeling pretty I'll really so was not in the best frame of mind for racing.
First race I got a great start, but then after first couple of laps drifted back as fatigue quickly set in really. A good tousle with new rider James Lancaster was good fun.... James is also on a Replay tuned and prepared bike. His bike has a little more BHP on the dyne and James being young whippersnapper of course he only weighs 4 stone so he was carrying good straight line speed.
I was parked up with Chris Geyton who will be riding under the Team Replay banner this year whilst SRP is in 'sabbatical '. We wholes away the time between our two races by stripping his engine to replace broken gears! Chris had actually managed to complete the race despite having Two broken gears. I stripped the spare engine to extract the gearbox whilst Chris stripped the race engine to allow us to swap them over and get him out in race two. The change went smoothly in the warm sun and of course as always attracted the interest of spectators keen to see the insides of a broken engine!
in the second race I had a (thankfully rare) mechanical gremlin and the gear cable slipped and it lost me first gear as I tried to select it on the start line! I had to pull away in second as it wouldn't select so naturally I was eaten up off the line by the rest of the pack. Adrenalin kicked in and I put my head down and quickly caught the tail enders back up, and on lap 2 went back past James Lancaster through the Edwinas chicane. This was to be short-lived though as up to the hairpin I still could not properly select first gear and then as I progressed on even 4th was tricky as the slop in the cables just seemed to get worse.
There was no real option but to cruise round and just get a finish and collect some points.
The meeting proved pretty interesting for the spectators as some unusual faces were having superb days. Guy Topper was absolutely flying on the cooler 250 and was phenomenally quick leaving the rest of the field trailing by a country mile........ And Guy also had a major hand in preparing Doug Turners group 6 bike which was also going extremely well propelling Doug up to the front. Also notably fast was John Woods on the blue SS 90 which has really come on now John has it setup right.
So overall for me a disappointing start to the season really, illness and stressful times had conspired to mean that I was not really mentally in the right place for this racing malarky. :-(
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