What a good do!

Peter Boast, Guy Martin and the Lincolnshire crew bagged an excellent second place at Donington’s Endurance Legends event, despite missing second gear

WE HAD A LOAD OF TROUBLE in practice for the classic endurance race at Donington. So, when I came past the pits about three laps into my third stint and saw the board said P2 I was thinking ‘Yippee’. And then I remembered last year, when we were leading our class until ten minutes before the end when the bike broke… We were entered as Team Lincolnshire Classic Suzuki with Guy Martin and myself riding Kev Pearson’s Suzuki XR69 replica (even though Kev’s from York). It’s a great bike, but during my first qualifying session on Saturday it jumped out of second gear a couple of times. Once going into Redgate which was hairy. Then Guy went out and had no problems, so I’m thinking maybe it’s me. Anyway, we qualified eighth, so not bad. Then on the Sunday warm-up it worked fine for me but jumped out of gear for Guy. There wasn’t much we could do about it so we raised the gearing to try and reduce the load on the box. Which was the wrong thing to do, we should have lowered it so we could use third more easily, but it’s easy to be clever afterwards. I did the first session and we got a decent start and were up to fifth, but after six laps the gearbox wouldn’t change down into second. It really knocks your confidence so I started dropping back and we were ninth when I pitted and handed over to Guy. He was running a good pace, and got us back some places but when he came in for my go he says: ‘She’s knackered boy, it’s up to you, but she’s knackered.’ Which didn’t sound very good. I only tried to get second twice and when I realised I couldn’t get it, I just used third for the rest of the session. That meant carrying more corner speed and losing drive out of the corners. There’s a lot of important second gear corners at Donington – Redgate, Mcleans and the chicane before the pits – so it was costing us time and slipping the clutch isn’t great for the bike either. But the rest of the bike was good, the pitstops were slick and a load of the other teams were having trouble too. Phase One crashed on lap three which lost them a load of time, Team Neate were out after 108 laps and the main Team Classic Suzuki, who were running Steve Parrish, John Reynolds and Michael Neeves on their Katana, knackered their engine after 102 laps. That left Team Force from Belgium, running a Harris framed Suzuki in the lead with us and Moto Bel, from France running a Moto Guzzi, two laps back battling for second. My third session was tough. I hadn’t eaten or drunk enough. I was dehydrating and it was hard to concentrate. The team brought me in early so that Guy, who was faster than me, got a full 45 minutes for his final session. At that point we were third, but the Guzzi team needed another pit stop, so it was all fingers crossed till Guy crossed the line. We’re all dead chuffed. I’ve been asked to ride the Team Classic Suzuki Katana with John Reynolds at Oscherselben, and then it’s Spa with our GSX-R750 at Bikers Classic on 29 June to 1 July. That’s plenty of time and both me and Guy are really looking forward to it.

‘She’s knackered boy, it’s up to you, but she’s knackered’