On The Edge Racing

Sorry for not writing for a while, but things have been a bit fraught at On The Edge HQ!

The reliability that we enjoyed last year seemed to have disappeared (literally) in a puff of smoke in the early part of the 2010 season.
In additions to the issues with the Imp, detailed below, we have also been building a GPZ750 post-classic bike for John (Wilkie) to race next season,
and have been continuing work on Howard's Imp outfit, which he also hopes to race next year.

Here is  a brief report on what has happened thus far this year:-

PEMBREY

We arrived at Pembrey to be confronted with a flooded paddock, and the majority of the sidecars crews camped outside of the main enclosure, on the outside of the track.
We managed to secure the last bit of dry ground inside the main paddock, an area that bore a strong resemblance to to a post-tsunami refugee camp.

On the Saturday, we manage to secure reasonable finishes in both races, but found it difficult to find any grip in the damp conditions. 

On the Sunday morning, John topped the bike up with fresh fuel; we had been running on fuel left over from the Mallory running-in session on the Saturday; this is where the problems started!
When we tried to fire the bike up, it was extremely difficult to start, and smoked a lot. We went out onto the sighting lap for the first race, and it was apparent that the bike was in no fit state to race, so we came in and abandoned it for the weekend.

The day was not a complete wash-out however as both Shelli and I had secured parade rides on our dream solo's!
Shelli was riding Tony Dunnell's beautiful and super-quick 350cc Manx Norton that is raced by Mike Cooper  . This was Shelli's first ever track ride on a solo, and she was on someone else's bike what was worth in excess of 30 thousand pounds,,,,,,,,,,,,needless to say, she loved it.
I was riding Paul Allender's Yamaha TZ 750. If you haven't ridden a big TZ, let me assure you that they are a whole different league of scary to any other bike. It was so quick that I thought someone had stolen the
start/finish straight!  What they are like in the hands of someone even vaguely competent on a track, I can't imagine........it even made a muppet like me look fast. One person who is extremely competent on one is Paul.......that's why he's leading the championship as we speak. Well done mate!

Upon arriving home, we could not find anything amiss with the bike, but it still refused to run. Then we had a bit of good fortune...I topped Shelli's VTR 1000 road bike up with fuel from the race fuel left over from Pembrey and that refused to run. It transpired that the fuel we had bought from a local garage was contaminated with diesel!

We flushed out the tank and fuel lines, and cleaned the carbs, and after filling with fresh fuel the bike ran perfectly. The disturbing thing is, John had been having problems with his ZXR1200 road bike at the same time, and when he drained the bike and filled it with fresh fuel, it solved that problem as well. His problem was also contaminated fuel, but he had bought his from a different petrol station in Sheffield.

MALLORY PARK

The next meeting was a one day event at Mallory Park, not our favourite track, but one we know well, so we were looking forward to doing quite well there.

Everything was fine until we exited Gerrard's for the third time in practice..........there was a large, and expensive, bang! :-(

The number two con rod had let go, and I whipped the clutch in, moved the bike off the racing line and coasted to a halt.

I looked across a Shelli, only to see her brand new, made to measure Crowtree leathers covered, from head to toe, in Castrol R and bits of aluminium...........needless to say, she looked less than happy!

We pushed the bike back to the paddock to survey the mechanical carnage that had ensued, and discovered a 5 inch square hole in the front of the block, and bits of the piston crown laying in the nose of the fairing. It was kind of one of the marshals to bring the con-rod to us, but sadly I think it was beyond repair.

In the first race, Clive Faulkner suffered a similarly catastrophic blow up in exactly the same place............the long right hander of Gerrard's has caused oil surge in his Honda engine as well, and claimed another victim.

DARLEY MOOR

After the blow up, John and I built up the spare engine and fitted into the bike, however the new engine is an Imp rather than the later Sunbeam engine, so there were several issues with the primary drive not lining up, and the lightened flywheel not fitting. Fortunately, Dave Johnson was kind enough to loan us his Imp flywheel until we could get suitable one machined by the extremely affable and capable Mr.Allender, who also put several of his own projects on a back burner to make up the necessary parts to sort out the primary drive. Thanks Paul, without you we really would have struggled to get the bike ready in time.

It should be pointed out at this point that Paul absolutely hates four strokes, and sidecars in particular! His partner Janice however is another story!

At Darley Moor we were flying in practice; at times literally, as we straight-lined the chicanes; but a least this year I didn't get a bollocking from Kerry Charlesworth!

On the second lap of the first race, as we exited the hairpin, the mechanical gremlins struck again! The gearbox exploded as I put the power on!

Investigation in the paddock revealed that there were only two teeth left upon the second layshaft gear. Game over for another weekend.

At lunchtime, the CRMC had organised (maybe too strong a word!) taxi rides for marshals, partners and general hangers on. I was supposed to be taking Janice out for this, but as she would have had to push the gearboxless bike round, she elected to go out with Dennis Etheridge instead.

I guess she must have enjoyed the ride on Dennis's Period 1 Norton, as she now has a passenger license, and is looking for a ride, having failed dismally to persuade Paul that  three  wheels are the way to go.

KNOCKHILL

Back at Birley Edge, Shelli decided that we should take the plunge and invest in a TT Industries gearbox from New Zealand. As soon as she had sanctioned the three thousand pounds of expenditure, I got on the phone and placed the order. I placed the order on the Monday lunchtime, and a week later the nice man from DHL delivered the made-to-order gearbox. That's what I call service!

Yet again Paul came to the rescue, modifying the clutch to hydraulic operation, using a Suzuki GSXR slave cylinder, a conversion so neat that the UK importer for TTI gearboxes wants to recommend Paul's work to other people who want to change to a hydraulic clutch.

John and I fitted the gearbox without any problems and we set off North full of high hopes for Knockhill.

We took the bike out in practice (after I had figured out that the gearchange pattern was backwards compared to the old Norton box!) and discovered that the bike was drastically under-geared.

I pulled of of the track and returned to the paddock, but when we removed the rear wheel to change the rear sprocket, we discovered that one of the rear wheel bearing had collapsed.

Our bike runs larger rear wheel bearings than most outfits; presumably because of the lack of rear suspension; and we were unable to locate a spare despite asking everyone in the paddock, the kart guys at the track and the stock car drivers who had arrived for the race on Saturday evening. Keith and Dave Latheron even went to the lengths of pulling there stricken Weslake outfit apart, but to no avail. Thanks for trying though chaps. One local guy even spent Saturday evening going through his shed to see what he had, and came back to the track on Sunday morning clutching an assortment of bearings, but none were suitable. Things like that make you realise what nice people you meet when involved in bike racing.

We had no choice but to call it a day, a long drive for two laps! The mechanical woes were now getting boring.

ANGLESEY

With new wheel bearings, we had high hopes of a successful meeting at Anglesey, surely the most striking circuit in the UK, the track is situated on a peninsula and enjoys stunning views. the best way to describe it is like a Welsh Philip Island.

The first race on Saturday was damp, but we managed to finish running the new engine in and learn the circuit, as it was our first time there. To be honest, we were relieved just to get a finish.
In the second race on the Saturday we were able to up the pace a bit, making the most of our increasing track knowledge and an engine with a few more miles under it's belt. Another finish and some more points in the bag! And we avoided being lapped by the front runners for the first time!

The weather on Sunday was much better and the track was dry, we had a cracking race with Dave le Pavoux on his newly acquired, ex-Etheridge, Wistanley Imp. For all six laps we were really close and on several laps we ended up side-by-side through the "Corkscrew", a tricky, complex downhill combination of corners. We just managed to get the better of Dave and Adam on the last lap and we pipped them to the line by two thousandths of a second. Good safe racing with someone of similar pace and tremendous fun. Un fortunately, during this race On The Edge Racing suffered our first racing injury of the season, John fell off of the pit wall and damaged the tendon connections in his shoulder! It must have been the excitement of seeing us actually finish a race!

The last race of the weekend got off to a bad start, with us being held on the grid for ages, many of the bikes were overheating, with Ian Johnson/Kevin Roughan and Simon Smith/Dave Gristwood being pulled off of the grid. Simon did have an oil leak (from a holed oil filter) but Ian and Kevin were unlucky, there was nothing wrong with their bike at all. They however were luckier than poor Karl Underwood, who parted company with Mike Bellaby and the JRS Weslake, injuring his arm quite badly. Still, at least there was someone to keep John company in the medical centre.

We were held out on the track while the medical team scooped Karl up, and I took advantage of the delay to scrouge a bottle of water from one of the marshals and top up the radiator in the very hot and bothered Imp. We are hoping for sponsorship from Evian for next season! We were unable to renew hostilities with Dave and Adam at the restart, they were having gearchange problems, but it was nice of Dave to come up and apologise for not coming out to play. We finished after a good steady ride, happy and relieved to have four finishes from four starts.

SILVERSTONE CLASSIC

This was a bit of a different event for the team, our bike was on display on the CRMC stand at one of the years leading classic car events, and a lot of the CRMC post-classic riders were doing a demonstration parade.

The outfit attracted a lot of attention, presumably because it has a car engine, and we enjoyed walking around the paddock. It was like automotive pornography, with Aston Martins, Ferraris, Maseratis and the like everywhere........millions and millions of pounds worth of them!

The high-point of the weekend for me was when Steve "Gremlin" Walls offered me a ride on his Gremlin Racetech Suzuki XR69, the only problem was that I had no helmet or leathers with me. John Mitchell, the stand organiser, CRMC webmaster and all-round good egg did not see this as a problem and set about getting me some gear, with great success. I took to the track on Sunday on Steve's bike, wearing George's leathers, Shelli's socks and using the ever-helpful Paul Allender's fuel (Do you detect a bit of a theme here? We have  problems, Paul solves them!).........at least the underwear was my own (and clean)!

I enjoyed three fairly steady laps on Steve's bike managing to stay out of the way of the proper solo riders who actually knew what they were doing, although it was a bit disconcerting when Paul came past me on the inside of a bend at about four times my speed and waved as he came through.....................at least I think he was waving?????????

Sadly the afternoon was marred by "Gremlin" sliding off of his number one bike (he found some oil that a car had dropped on the track) and being run over my an entirely innocent Simon Bartlett. The injuries to Steve's arm are quite severe, and all of us at On The Edge Racing wish him all the best.

DONINGTON PARK

The CRMC were lucky enough to be the club that were first to race at the newly reopened Donington Park, and we traveled down there on the Thursday lunchtime, we timed our arrival perfectly, as we had just got the awning set up when there was a torrential thunderstorm that flooded our section of the paddock.

Both practices were fine, but the track was very slippery, due to 10 months lack of use and construction vehicles having dropped all sorts of liquids on the track, and, other than a few slides, were incident free.

The start of the Friday race was delayed for a long time, and again the bike got really hot. After one aborted start, the race got under way. After about two hundred yards, our bike just cut out, and we pushed it back to the paddock. John and I checked the bike out but could find nothing wrong. We put it back together and it started straight away..........it must have been caused by either the damp conditions or overheating, I guess we'll never know.

The first race on Saturday was a lot better, Shelli's passengering was faultless, and we got our best start ever. Another decent, solid ride, points in the bag and no dramas.

Buoyed with confidence after the morning's race we took for the grid for the second race full of confidence, and got another great start. after a couple of laps Shelli was tapping on the leg to tell me that someone was approaching......fast! As we exited Redgate Mr. le Pavoux made his move, getting alongside as we dived down Craner Curves and leading into the Old Hairpin. We made up a bit of ground up the hill and held onto the back of the green and white Imp through the two subsequent corners, getting a bit better drive down the straight. Despite me going into the newly remodeled chicane a bit too fast, Shelli managed to sort it all out and we got round, but Dave and Adam made the most of their better drive onto the start finish and led over the line.

As we approached Redgate we went up the inside and managed to pass the Gristwood and Toms bike on the brakes, only for Dave to do exactly the same thing to us on the next lap! Dave ran a bit wide on the exit to Redgate, but not enough for us to sneak past, and Dave and Adam took their revenge for Anglesey.

In the Sunday race, we agreed that Shelli would try passengering the chicane differently, having sought advice from the hugely experienced Andy "Bludge" Smith, who was standing in for the still injured Karl Underwood. Unfortunately, this didn't work as the Imp is a lot heavier that Mike Bellaby's Wessie, and we were unable to catch Mr. le Pavoux this time. Still, there's always Snetterton!