Star Bikes Circuit TT championship Event 2 – Saturday 29th March 2008

 

Steve Macklin got his championship bid off to a superb start with a convincing victory in the opening event of the Star Bikes championship. He beat second place Mark McKeown by 26 seconds with 3rd placed Paul Purdy a similar margin behind.  Although Steve has put a clear marker down that he could win the overall series, this years championship could be one of the closest fought yet with several riders in with a good chance of victory and at the moment no clear favourite identified. I know Mark was particularly pleased with his performance having gained his best ever finishing position in these events.

 

The next 3 riders the 3 “Marks”, Ollernshaw, Summer and |Walker were each about 20-30 seconds apart. The next 3 were myself, Andy Carrol and Simon Mason who were all on 27 minutes. Both Simon and Andy have been training hard over the winter as they improved on their personal best for the course by 43 and 34 seconds respectively on a far from ideal day. In my opinion Simons ride must rate as the ride of the day. Rounding off the top 10 was new member Carl Dickinson who was making his debut as a HTRC rider and put in a very good performance to record 28.15

 

After the cancellation of event 1 the series finally started somewhat later than planned. A mix up over the submission of the police forms and a new traffic sergeant, resulting in a lack of police approval and a belated start to the season for many riders. 22 riders met up at the slightly earlier time of 1.00pm to face a single lap of the Skidby 10 mile circuit. Weather conditions on Saturday morning had been glorious but slowly the bright blue skies clouded over and heavy rain and strong winds were forecast. Fortunately the worst of the conditions held of until after the riders had finished although the rain did start falling just as the last rider left the timekeepers. It also got noticeably windier about 20 minutes before the start. Still it could have been an awful lot worse as by 3.30pm the weather was atrocious so I guess we should be thankful for some good fortune. The wind was blowing in a generally southerly direction and was mostly a cross wind although there were some short section of back and head wind. As usual the last 5 miles were noticeably faster than the first 5 mainly uphill miles.

Although numbers generally were down on previous years 3 brave ladies turned up to ride with Jayne, Dawn and Alison all training for a forthcoming triathlon, this is the most ladies we have had racing for a number of years. There were also 3 private entries boosting the numbers.

It was great to see Nathan and Lesley at the start complete with their new addition to the family Cecily at just 4 days old. I’d like to offer congratulations to Nathan and Lesley from all members of HTRC

 

Phillip Eden had volunteered to organise the event and helped me significantly at the start. It’s always a bit fraught at the 1st event of the season getting every thing organised and a new CTT requirement to submit the signing on sheets at the end of the season have meant a slight change to the signing on procedure. Basically everyone riding needs to sign and to avoid paying levies for riders not turning up the sheet needs to be filled in at the start. No real problems here and thanks to Phil for his help. Thanks also to Barry, Les Andy and Gil for time-keeping and pushing off etc

 

If anybody rode a standard road bike please let me know so that I can allocate the bonus points as with everything else to do I completely overlooked this.

The next event is the Prolouge from Weedley mast to Eppleworth road on Tuesday 9th April. The event will start at 7.01pm prompt and everyone will need to meet up at Skidby to get numbers etc and then ride out in good time for the start. Please do not be late, as I will be riding out myself and will be leaving Skidby NLT 6.30pm.