Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
SPLASH AND DASH A BRILLIANT BLAST
I don’t normally fall in love with blokes, but with Dave I might make an exception. He was my instructor at the Honda Ron Haslam Race School and, after half a day zooming around Donington Park in torrential rain, he came over and said the nicest thing a bloke’s ever said to me.
“Geoff,” he informed me. “You’re not the slowest rider I’ve ever had.”
“Really?”
“Far from it. I had one old guy who rode around at 40mph, including the straights, but got off with the biggest grin I’ve ever seen.”
An RAF engineer whose day job is fixing fast jet engines, Dave tried the Ron Haslam school as a customer in 2001, and loved it so much he decided to take up racing.
Ron, who’s now 61, won three world and four British championships in a 30-year career before retiring and starting up the school at Donington with son Leon. He’s now carrying on the family tradition in World and British Superbikes.
It’s obviously a huge success. On a day when even the ducks had packed up and gone home to dry out, the giant hall at Donington, where the course is based, was packed with riders wandering around the stands of school sponsors such as insurer Carole Nash.
The Premier course I was on, using Honda CBR600RRS, consists of three 15-minute track sessions, with briefings before and after each one.
The word from Dave after my first outing was: “Doing fine, nice and smooth with good lines. Next time we’ll pick up the speed a bit, and pick up the bike a bit earlier coming out of corners.”
Being a good boy who always does what I’m told, I did all that, and it was a happy Dave who came over at the end of a last session in which I’d passed not one, but two riders.
“You enjoyed that, didn’t you! Well done. In spite of the horrendous conditions, you picked up the pace every lap. Now you’ll have to come back on a dry day,” he said, shaking my hand and sending a shower of water over our sodden boots.
I was, in fact, so drenched that on the flight home my luggage weighed 3kg more than on the flight out and, enjoyable though the day had been, I was glad to get out of those wet leathers and into a dry Martini.