Cyclopark Regional – South RD2
Woke up feeling a bit sore but not too bad considering the effort that I had put in yesterday and how bad I felt when I went to bed. After a shower I felt 100% again, especially after a slathering of Voltorol on my bum knee 🙂
When I opened the curtains I was surprised to see that it was wet and foggy 🙁 a total opposite of the weather yesterday!! Annoyingly I hadn’t packed cold weather clothes for myself or my Son so I had race shorts and lightweight pads instead of my proper pads and race pants. I also told my Son to leave his coat at home as he would not need it! So he had to use my rain jacket and hoody to keep warm and dry so I had no warm clothes.
When we got to the track it was rammed and was pretty much the same a National Weekend as there were 530 riders registered to ride on Sqorz. We stopped off at Crucial and picked up my Onyx wheel that they had built up for me and a couple of T-shirts that they brought with them for me.
I got my son setup near the first berm so that he could laugh at me bouncing down the first straight and then got setup and went to do some practice laps.
I got a couple of laps in and then the lines in the pens stopped moving after about 10 minutes we found out that a kid had crashed sending one of the jumps and they were waiting for the ambulance. It was absolutely freezing stood in the pens so once we got moving I did a lap and then went to tell my son that the team gazebo was up but he had already found it. I while I was in the gazebo there were another 3 crashes so I decided to stay in the warm. Luckily I had bought a couple of t-shirts from Crucial so I put one of them on to get warmer and it did the trick. I tried to get a hoody but none of the vendors brought any as they didn’t think that they would sell any as the weather was so good the week before the race!
Racing went OK but due to the resurface making the first straight harder to ride my times were way slower than the National times last year so I didn’t get anywhere near dropping 4 seconds off of my lap time! In fact I was 5 seconds lower in my first moto!!!!
Here are my times for the day:
I got steadily better during the day and I was winning the B final until the last straight where I left the door open and got passed!! My final was the only lap where I was smooth and pretty quick on the 2nd and 3rd jumps on the first straight and the 1st jump was slow but smoother too! I also took 4.3 seconds off of my 1st moto lap time and 0.124 off of my gate time. I was way off of the times of the winner of the A final still who had a gate of 2.671 and a lap time of 39.718. I think that this was the only sub 40 second time of the weekend which shows that the track was slower today compared to the National last year! so I don’t feel so bad.
Taking 4 seconds off in a day shows that with a bit of work on my manuals, I may be able to get faster again and be a little more competitive. Another positive to take away from the day is that my gate time was faster than all but 3 of the riders in the A final so happy with that. Another positive is that my knee was pain free until after the final and I didn’t crash and had fun so a good weekend all around!
I have just been going through the stats in scores and gate wise I was 5th overall for the day so it definitely shows that my track skills and speed are letting me down! this is highlighted as there is a rider with a slightly slower gate time than me who has a 3 second faster lap time 🙁
