Radnor Downs- February 17th 2007

I didn’t very far to travel to this one, only about 25 miles or so, a bit of a luxury that.
I arrived quite early and walked parts of the course which basically was a lot of flat fields with a couple of small climbs. There wasn’t much of a track, you just had to ride in-between the markers, the course being only 3-4 miles in length.
With the wet weather that we had all week, the grass was soaked and somewhat ‘squelchy’, and with a trails tyre only allowed on the back, this was going to be interesting, and with quads and sidecars racing, the course was going to get cut up badly (and it did).
The organisers had cut the time of the race to about 2 and quarter hours (I think!).

Off on our sighting lap we went and within a few hundred yards the bike had died on me, I knew what it was straight away, a fouled plug, I quickly put another in, and off I went again. One thing I have noticed about my bike, it hates ‘pottering’ along at a slow speed, it adores being revved!

Lap over, time for racing, I made my usual customary bad start and got caught up in the bottleneck just after start/finish line, got held up a bit there.
After a few laps the course was beginning to cut up badly, and by about an hour into it, there were huge long stretches of deep thick mud which you had to plough through. The rear of the bike was all over the place, and many a time I went round corners ‘speedway’ style, this certainly was going to test your throttle control and handling.

Just before my scheduled pit stop the bike coughed and spluttered on me and died, right in the middle of a deep thick mud section that I was going through. Great!
I kicked her over, nothing, kicked again, and again, and again, I kicked frantically for what seemed like ages, she just wouldn’t start, defeated, i pushed the bike over to the side, thought for a minute, and looked down towards the engine. I have never ever, had any problems restarting or starting for that matter, so I feared the worse and thought it was something majorly wrong, that is until………………………………………….i realised that I’d run out of fuel (what a twat)!
Because of the testing conditions and the bike revving so high to make it through all the gloopy mud, I’d used more fuel than I thought I would.
So I turned on the reserve, kicked it into action, and off I went back to the pits to refuel.

Another hour in and getting a bit worried about running out of fuel, I decided to make a 2nd stop in the pits just to make sure I’d make it to the end.
When I came in, my mate who was helping me out, run over and told me not to bother as the chequered flag had come out, the race had finished.
As I tried to kick the bike back into action and rush to the finish line, I over balanced and landed on my arse in front of the full view of everyone (twat), and the bike went with me, I didn’t blame people for laughing at me, it was one of those ‘you’ve been framed moments’!.
I got up off the floor and picked up the bike, sh*t, broken handgaurd, never mind, then with my tail between my legs, crawled to the finish was only about 10 yards away.

Lost quite a bit of time today due to a bit of inexperience.

Finishing position: 11/33
Bike status: new handgaurds
Injuries: none