Short season ends well for sidecar pair
MORETON-IN-MARSH sidecar driver Wayne Lockey ended a brief racing season with a pair of strong performances at the EMRA club’s season finale at Mallory Park in Leicestershire.
Lockey, with regular passenger Mark Sayers, intended to use the meeting to test a new air box system on his LCR outfit but was entered as a reserve.
His luck was in however, as another competitor blew an engine in practice, meaning Lockey would be on the grid for the day’s two races - but had to start from the back.
With a large number of outfits starting ahead of him, including some slower classic machines, the best he could hope for would be to get as close as possible to the front with only eight laps of the 1.35-mile track to come.
Lockey said: “We moved up several places halfway round the first lap and must have passed half the field by lap three. We never stopped overtaking people and finished sixth.
“If we’d had another couple of laps we could have been somewhere near the front.”
In between races the team made suspension changes and fitted a less worn rear tyre to try and take advantage of moving up the grid to start race two from sixth place.
“There was more feel, which allowed us to push on, but not quite as hard as we would have liked,” said Lockey.
“It took half the race to get past some of the crews that started ahead of us but then on the last lap we moved to go up the inside at Edwina’s for the lead but had no grip. We had to back out of it and ended up on the grass.”
Lockey and Sayers got back under control but there wasn’t enough time left to recover their position and finished fourth.
Lockey was pleased with the way the meeting went though: “We were lapping in the 57 second bracket on old tyres so we were happy with the times. For us to go there intending to test and having that good a race was excellent and great fun.”
For Cirencester racer Alan Moreton, the day did not go as planned.
A previous EMRA club champion, he had come out of retirement to race his beautifully turned out Suzuki RG500 in the Early stocks class – a series aimed at road-based machines from the 80s and 90s.
At EMRA’S other meeting, Moreton recorded three wins on the Suzuki but a heavy crash in qualifying sidelined him for the day.
He said: “It was my fault – too fast too soon. We found afterwards that the exhaust had been rubbing on the rear tyre, which acted like a brake and caused the bike to tip into the corner more sharply. I clipped the rumble strip and went down.”
Moreton was unhurt but the bike sustained too much damage to continue.