WE’LL BE BACK
As far as weekends away with your mates go, our trip to the seaside for the annual Skegness Beach Race has got to be up there with the best of them. Bikes, the beach, beers and even one or two babes made sure the weekend was one to remember. And if you are wondering whether or not we will be going back, well, I promise you that I’ll be doing my very best to make sure we can make Team Fast Bikes’ return to Skeg-vegas a reality in 2020.
A few days have passed now since two of us crossed the line and one of us spent an afternoon in the company of a couple of paramedics, so I have had a bit of time to recover (I needed it; I could barely walk on Monday), and a bit of time to reflect on the weekend. What hadn’t occurred to me at the time was just how much effort had gone into making this event happen. A 4.5km (2.8mile) track, fashioned out of nothing but Skegness’s sand, doesn’t magic itself up overnight – the organisers put some serious hours in on some serious machinery to get the track up to beach racing spec. It must have been some effort, fair play.
And the organisers weren’t the only ones that made the effort – the people of Lincolnshire, and likely beyond, despite the crisp November weather, made the pilgrimage to the East Coast to get their fill of bike racing in their thousands. The track ran underneath the pier and along the side of the sea wall, both of which were full to bursting with race fans waving their programmes and wolfing down fish and chips. And who could blame them for making the effort – the whole event was one hell of a spectacle!
If you fancy yourself as a bit of an off-road rider, and you have got a motocross bike in your garage gathering dust – you know, that thing parked behind your road bike that your wife doesn’t know you have, or if she does, won’t let you even think about putting a set of new tyres on it until she gets a new stair carpet – well, it’s time you told her to wind her neck in and get your MX bike out. And I know an hour-and-a-half racing round a beach seems like a long time, but if I can drag my paunch round, there is no reason why you can’t either, after all we have got almost a year before the beach race is upon us again. And if you don’t think you can bring yourself to enter, well why not pop over to have a flutter in the amusement arcades and watch some seriously chaotic bike racing.
As far as next year goes, as I’ve said, I’m desperate to have another go at Skeggy (maybe next time I’ll remember to fit my transponder and actually get a result), but I enjoyed this year’s event so much that I fancy taking my beach racing career to the next level; I’m talking about Weston Beach Race, a race similar to Skeggy, but three hours long, with bigger dunes, longer straights and a lot more riders (there were over 700 starters at Weston in 2019) on the beach at Weston-super-Mare. I think if I’m going to last an extra hour-and-a-half though, I’m going to need to lay off the mince pies… is it January yet?