Rain masters
Six hours, in the pouring rain, on a 125? If there’s racing, Boastie will be there
With so little racing happening this year I’ll jump at almost any chance to get out on track, but even so I was a bit dubious when my mate Matt Bainbridge asked if I would ride with him and Gareth Atkin on a Honda CBR125F in a six-hour endurance race at Mallory Park, on the last day of October. I mean, it’s not exactly a GSX-R750 in mid-summer at Paul Ricard, is it? But any race is better than no race at all.
These Freetech endurance events have basically three classes, sort of slow, slower, slowest, and tight rules to keep the costs down. Matt’s bike, in the Streetstock class, looks a bit racified, but with an untuned engine and, basically, a standard chassis.
It was hammering down and blowing a gale on the grid. The girl in a miniskirt trying to hold up a 30 second board was almost blown away. Matt got a decent start but we were soon in the pits with a misfire caused by water in the plug cap. Gaffer tape fixed the hole in the fairing, but by then we were down in 70th, there’s a lot of bikes out there. So we had to get a move on.
The weather was vicious. At one point it was blowing a force nine gale so the bike wouldn’t pull sixth along the straight, then it’d hit the limiter going the other way. You could hardly see through your visor and people were falling off everywhere, but on racing wets you can still get your knee down and we were flat out at 85mph going into Gerards. After the mid-way stop the sun came out but the track was wet through. In the end we were 20th.
The race was won by Tim Neave’s team, and he’s a national level Superstock rider; there were some fast people out there, but this is cheap racing and I think it’ll grow. I’m hoping that I get to do some more next year. Meanwhile it’s back to the workshop where we are building another supermono, based on what we learned with our Tigcraft KTM last season (or what of it there was). I’m praying that the TT will happen in 2021.