On The Edge Racing

The first half of the sidecar season has been great!

A winter spent modifying the bike chassis (thanks Windle guys), fitting a new radiator and generally tweaking the bike has paid off and we have got off to a flying start. Dark, wet winter evenings do not encourage good gym attendance but I’m glad that I did manage to drag myself to the local leisure centre: hanging on to the outfit now that Nick’s found his ‘race head’ would have been a challenge otherwise.

We opened the season at Mallory. Our trusty mechanic was spending the weekend protesting about things in London leaving Nick on his own to work on the bike with trusty passenger doubling up as spanner-passer.  Mallory held no great surprises : it was cold and there were ducks. The ranks of passengers continued to swell with new driver Tim Chapman bringing out his son, Neil. Tim has a veritable harem of passengers and will also be seen throughout the season with Nick George and family friend James taking turns in the chair. It also has to be said that second son, Luke, originally describing himself as ‘purely a car man’ is fast developing an interest in all things slidey.

The second meeting was the traditional ‘Easter at Pembrey’ event.   Sue Wale was to be seen sporting her usual chicken based paddock wear and receiving offerings of Easter eggs. It was at Pembrey that I finally got to grips with Sue’s sidecar ritual, this involves stroking Kevin Roughan’s bottom in the holding area prior to every foray out onto the track. I had always assumed this was a basic kinkiness, BUT NO! ........................... apparently on the one occasion that this ritual was not followed Kevin broke his leg out on track!
By Pembrey passenger mania had crept  into the solo paddock – now for some this may be considered a step too far. Prior to Pembrey Carol Klatkiewicz was to be seen prowling through the forum touting for a ride. Matt Kingsmill stepped up to the mark and Carol was to be seen with a huge grin on her face after spending the whole of Friday afternoon in the chair.

Donington was a one day meeting and the turnout was pretty small. Sidecars were down to an entry of 20 Those of us who were able to be there did so mainly for the pleasure of the Melbourne Loop. And a pleasure it is. Or it is when you remember to go right and not left into the loop hairpin. Thankfully it was only practice when I pulled that particular stunt – I may have convinced Nick that it was a deliberate ploy to test out the handling of the chassis, or maybe not. The bird theme continued with racing brought to a halt due to ‘geese on the track’. It took two ambulances, one track vehicle and five marshalls to finally gather together a family of geese which had decided that tarmac is the way to go.

Finally, we have just returned from a fabulous three day meeting at Anglesey. I was initially disappointed to see that we would not be doing the ‘Corkscrew’, scene of our epic battle last year with Dave Le Pavoux and Adam Lambert. Side by side, lap after lap, Adam and I spent most of that race eye-balling each other as our drivers tried again and again to find the best way of shutting the door on each other through the tight left-right-left downhill swoop.  But alas this year no corkscrew. However, I have to say that the National Circuit is a peach. The left hander onto the ‘loop’ and the one back onto the start/finish are both heart-stoppers particularly the latter having just come belting down the quite considerable ‘straight’. Tight dicing with Simon Smith and Dave Gristwood round the former gave me the opportunity for a ‘does my bum look big like this?’ moment, contributing to Nick’s daring blocking movement by sticking my bum almost on Simon’s’s nose cone. Anglesey proved to be our best racing yet, finally playing with the Gristwood boys and how much fun is that!  We secured two 3rd places in the UEM championship races and received the applause of our fellow racers and 4 rather nice pewter tankards – guess we’ll find a use for those ;).

A truly wonderful weekend was crowned by the generosity of Mr Roger Collett who has kindly offered us a contribution to our racing fund. What a lovely man – thank you Roger!.