The Biker Place

With the dissapointment I had at Brands of not been able to get out for qualifying, I was eager to get out there at Thruxton and see what I could do. We arrived on Thursday and drove all the way down in glorious sunshine. Only me and my younger brother went so we were taking turns driving the van! 4 hours later we arrived and and met up with James’ team owner Ryan Saxelby and his mechanics at the circuit. We set up and made our van into our camper for the weekend. After making some final tweaks to the bikes we had a walk around the track to see if we could make any sense of it as neither me or my brother had turned a wheel around there.

Friday morning we were greeted with high winds and generally miserable conditions. It held out dry with the odd little bit of drizzle, but I managed to get through the practice sessions unscathed. I struggled to make anything of the session other than to get a feeling of where to go on track. I ended up 20th after the 30minute session.

For Saturday the forecasters predicted heavy rain and they didn’t disapoint. I woke to rain bouncing off the roof of the van and it never really stopped all day. I got a new rear rain tyre on early in the morning as we were the first bikes out on track at 9am. The track was very wet, but there was no standing water and the surface was very grippy in the wet conditions. I had no one doing my pit board so I went out and just did as many laps as I could. I did my fastest on lap 16 of 16. I pulled into pit lane and looked at the screens to see how I had done. I had to do a double take and was really suprised to see I had finished 3rd place. I was really happy with this, but I was still over 3 seconds off the blistering lap time Joel Morris had done! For session 2 I put another new rear tyre in and altered the suspension for a bit more stabilty in the wet, but it didn’t really help with so many bikes out on track I never got a clear lap and I struggled with visabilty from spray when I was behind another rider. I improved my time down to a 1:27.357, but I dropped to 17th overall. I was a little dissapointed with this, but I was on the grid and this had improved to 16th by Sunday as a rider up front had dropped out.

Sunday came and we went out for our warmup in the sunshine, the track was still a little damp in places, but I still went over a second faster than friday in the total dry and finished the session in 5th, just 0.303 off the time Luke Jones set. We had a long wait for the race and with all the stoppages throughout the day I was starting to wonder if we would get out and race. I was more nervous than usual as I really didn’t know what to expect from the other riders or what the tyres would do mid way through the race as the temperature had risen and Thruxton is very harsh on rubber! I had a pretty good grid spot, it was 4th row so pretty far back, but it was on the inside and looking straight into turn 1 so I knew I had a good opportunity to make some places on the 1st lap.

I got a pretty good get away and passed a few cautious riders on the 1st lap and was already up to 10th just behind Robbie Brown and 3 other riders infront. I held the place, but knew I was been held up a little especially through the last chicane, but still been a little cautious I held my spot. On lap 4 I had a bit of a moment through turn 1 spinning the rear up and nearly spitting me off and by lap 5 the rear tyre had lost alot of grip on the right side. I noticed this with alot of other riders too with the rears squirming trying to get the power down to the ground. I began to get a little frustrated with the pack infront as they felt to be coming to a halt through the final chicane and I knew there would be loads of riders behind waiting to pounce on me. The next lap I got passed by Alex Gault into the complex area on the brakes and then the lap after that I went a little wide goin into the same complex allowing another rider to pass. I passed him back on the exit of Noble, but was passed back again as I went a little wide into the following corner. Another lap round and I made another mistake into the 1st complex going down into 2nd gear instead of 3rd allowing 3 riders past and putting me back into 14th. I was annoyed with myself for such a silly mistake, but with the bike and track been so new to me Im bound to make a few mistakes and with the field been so close every mistake cost me dearly. Before I had chance to pull myself together and get back up there the red flags came out after Dan Smith fell not far infront on me on lap 10.

I was a little dissapointed with the result as I knew I could have done much better, but those couple of mistakes cost me and with the red flags coming out soon after I had no time to make ammends.

Hopefully I will have a bit of luck on my side at Oulton and it will help it been a track I know quite well. Ive not had any race experience there on the 600, but I have had some good results in the past on the 125.

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