Round 3: Anglesey, No drama!

After the fun and games of Snetterton, we arrived at Angelsey with a very clear strategy in our minds. We wanted a race with No Drama! We were sitting second in the championship and we were focused on taking the lead by the end of the weekend.

This was the first race of the year that Keith couldn’t do, due to band commitments, so our stand-in rider John Coughlan was with us. John fitted into the team straight away, and is paced quite evenly with Ben’s times.

A few laps into qualifying and we realised that the timings for Ben were not appearing on the screens. It turns out that our transponder number hadn’t been given to the timing people – which we only found out with a lot of running around and a bit of stress! But, a consistent qualifying session in the dry saw us take the P1 position for the race start, so we were all set.

Anglesey is very beautiful, right on the sea. New garages have recently been built and the facilities are going to be great…when they are finished. Because they are not yet finished a few things were missing – like being able to see the overall timing clock, not having data points for the monitor in the garages and only one monitor for the whole pitwall that could only be run from a wire fed down from the office above, so it could only be placed in one position!

Information and communication is key in endurance racing. The timekeepers on the wall need to be able to see what’s going on so they can signal positions and time differences to the team and the garage, so this was a bit awkward. It meant one of our timekeepers constantly running back and forwards to the screen to see what was going on.

The race started a little late, due to some overruns in earlier classes, and on one of our trips back and forward to the monitor we noticed that the race duration had suddenly been cut by 30 minutes! Was this a mistake? We quickly found an official and demanded an answer! No, it was no mistake; the race had indeed been cut by half an hour.

Very few people on the wall could see the overall clock, so this caused a lot of confusion.Some teams didn’t find out about it until they had only half an hour to go, and had no opportunity to adjust their strategy. Luckily, we had noticed the change and adjusted our plans.

So, we didn’t quite get our wish for no drama. There really isn’t such a thing in an endurance race – but this time it all happened off the track. Ben and John rode brilliantly, the changeovers were perfect and the weather was kind enough to mean that we didn’t get wet! A few spots of rain appeared in the last session but by then we had established a significant lead in our class – we were P1 and very happy!

As soon as we got the bikes to Park Ferme we texted Keith – it was certainly a very different weekend with him not there, but we were all very proud to have brought the win home and couldn’t wait to let him know!

Just before the podium it was announced that because the race had been cut short due to local noise restrictions after 5pm, an extra 30 mins would be added to the race at Oulton Park.