Nationals round 1, first time on a side car.
Righto, I'm instructed I have to write a full report on the event and how it came to pass that Alan and I, ended up racing. This is gonna be a long one, ya might wanna grab a coffee and a pack of bikkies.
It was always the plan that Jimmy and myself would be doing the NI rounds of the nats on Leanne Thomas' outfit. That went right out the window on Saturday night a week ago, when Warwick sent a text saying there weren't enough chairs entered to make a grid for the SI either. SHIT!
I quickly get on the blower to Leanne and ask if she is OK with us doing the whole series. As she was gutted it wasn't looking good she immediately agreed, (silly girl, aint you ever seen Jimmy and I ride)? Right, bike organised.
Phone Jimmy to see if he is coming with. He was unable to because of work commitments. SHIT! Bugger it, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.
I posted on here, and facebook that although we are keen as mustard and that without us there might not be a national points series for any sidecars this year, we aren't in a financial position to do it.
An unbelievable amount of support came through instantly! The lovely Chrissie chipping in a much larger than expected contribution, and some very good friends who are in no better position than we are to be funding racing, came to the party! We were totally blown away.
At the time I was in Aukland, as was the outfit. And as good an old nail as my RF is, there was no way of strapping a few extra hundred kilos on the back and getting it to Wellington. Enter another great friend Roger Cathro. "You need a trailer to get the outfit home"? Was his reply on facebook. I totally misread it and called him straight away. "Dude, it would be awesome if you could drive up here and get it"!
Without pausing he said it was a possibility and organised a sitter for the kids, jumped in his car at 9:30pm and headed for Aukland to get the outfit and me.
By now I'm totally blown away and kinda awestruck at the extent that friends will go to in order to help.
Sunday morning Roger and his lovely partner Alahna (sp) at 7:30am. We skull back a coffee and head for Leanne's pad, (read, house with LOADS of character) to grab the outfit. With a lot of effort and shoving about the bike is tied to a trailer built to hold one solo bike and home we head.
So I'm back in Wellington on Monday night with the chair in the shed. I still don't have a swinger to ride with, but there's hours left to sort that out! Leanne has said if worst comes to it she will do the job, so it gets bumped down the priority list.
Work on Tuesday and quite a hefty number of phone calls are going all over the country to try and sort the logistics of travel for the outfit down south. By mid day the best I could come up with was I would ride the chair onto the ferry, and Dave Annon would drive up to pick us up. Not ideal but the cheapest.
Time to ask another favour from a friend then. I call Gareth Easter to see if I might borrow his flat deck ute for the weekend, and he explains that the clutch is slipping. We come to an arrangement for me to rectify this problem so it's all good. I call him back shortly after and he goes WAY above the call and says it can stay there for the two weeks between Levels and Ruapuna rounds. Bloody MINT!
The list of shit to do is getting smaller rapidly and the pesky problem that these things are ridden with two people is in need of address. I had mentioned on facebook that I didn't have a confirmed swinger and I was called by Kevin Waugh, (Warfy round here). He says that if I need him, he'll make the trip down and put his body on the line! Shit, I'm sure more of you have seen me ride than this situation would imply! Since he had not planned on being there to start with, and the fact that Leanne was on standby I greatfully declined his offer, thinking that would be the end of this particular conversation and offer for support. But instead he asked for my account details and made a much needed and appreciated financial contribution. Some people are too good for the likes of me to know I tell ya!
It's probably Wednesday by now, buggered if I can remember when anything happened for the lask week though to tell the truth. Alan had put on my face book page that he is keen as mustard to have ago but needs to sort the time off work first, through a series of small miracles that comes together and I've got my swinger baby YEAH!
We sailed over Thursday night and arrived in Christchurch at around 1:30am the next day. After very little sleep on the floor we head for Timaru in convoy with Warwick.
Sign in and stuff, drag the outfit off the ute and head out for first practice. Comparatively things had been quite dull up untill this point!
Did I mention that Alan and I had at some point managed to go for a ride three hundred meters up my street to get a slight feel for the rig? That was the sum total of our seat time on one of these things!
We gently follow Jay Lawrence and Maxine 'the swinger', (for the life of me can't remember her surname, but she seems to respond to this when paged over the countdown intercom to be ID'd for the alcohol we were trying to buy, (which we still couldn't because the staff there thought I didn't look 25)), out onto the track. Since another thing I was doing for the first time was look at said track.
We all went round a few times and discovered we were in way over our heads, but it was a good laugh. I had adjusted the brake pedal on Leannes rig to accomodate bike boots, but since we had purchased some high tech racing footwear (a couple pairs of $17 chuck taylor rip offs from the warehouse), the added movement I had meant I'd been riding with the brakes on the whole time and the bike was becoming very reluctant to keep moving once they heated up to smoking temperature and siezed on.
Fixed that and went out a couple more times to try and get my rather under developed head around riding this critter, and Alan some more practice at what he was picking up from talking to and watching others, and as it turns out what he is figuring out himself as he is a bloody NATURAL! I however am not it would seem and I do my absolute best to toss Alan over the chair wheel coming at turn two, a tricky bastard of a turn as it follows left from the right hand turn one. Turn one is not that tight and I carried waaaaaay too much speed through it, as I stabbed at the brake pedal the bike started letting me know in no uncertain terms that it would stand for no such treatment. So when I tried to turn left anyway rather than ride straight on into a wall we went over the ripple strip, and up came the chair wheel...LOTS! "Oh shit, this is gonna get real nasty". Turn the wheel right to get the thing to come down, leaving us pointing back at the wall and repeat. By this time we're out of track and we sail straight over the outside ripple strip. That bugger is damn near a foot high and Alan was kinda floating off the tray from the violent up and down of me trying to turn the thing when we hit it. "Alan's chest, please meet the out rigger wheel cover of a sidecar". I have no idea how he held on as by the time I'd pitched the thing sideways to come to a stop in the dirt he's near turning blue from being winded.
I roll it to a safer spot and he takes a minute to recover, as we're rolling round to come back into the pits, Alan taps my leg and gives me the "all good, give it shit" thumbs up. "Are you fuckin mental" I'm thinking but at this point I felt so bad I wasn't gonna argue. We finished the session after another excursion off track when the throttle wouldn't close properly (caused by me shutting the throttle too quick and play in the return cable) coming into turn on.
Next session we go a bit faster in places and a LOT slower through turns one and two. By now I'm shattered and coming round the first right hander of the final shicane I stick my hand up to signal Alan and anyone else I intend to turn right into pit lane. Standard practice that, makes total sense, safest way to do it ya know. Except it's a right hand turn. Any guess' as to why Alan would promptly dive for the left once I'd signalled we wouldn't be turning that way, and subsequently be landing on less than a square meter of deck that was rapidly moving right and not gonna be there unless gravity could very suddenly be increased?
The spot in which I had decided to signal him (with my left hand) we weren't turning left but were instead going further right, is right about where he's doing his absolute damndest to get his head on the ground on the right hand side of the rear wheel.
Again, he manages to keep a hand on the bike and totally unknowingly I literally drag him behind the outfit into the pits. He gets himself back on the bike somehow and punches me in the ribs. Luckily the bike is quite loud, and I couldn't quite hear what it was he said to me as we went down pit lane. He wouldn't repeat it verbatim when questioned.
Gist was, and I'll take some liberties here in the interest of censorship, "when did we decide to turn in"?
"Oh, just after the hairpin, I signalled not long after".
"I didn't catch that, must be more observant next time".
"Roger that, shall we go get a bevvy"?
We took a lot of positives away from the test day and Alan quite a few bruises. So we felt a lot more at ease about things. (But still didn't investigate the phenomenon of Alan not seeing a size large gloved hand being held up in quite close proximity to himself for some reason).
Morning practice on Saturday and we got some times. Jay and Max are lapping seven seconds quicker than us but we're getting better all the time. Then jay decides it's time to get creative with his methods and tosses Max off the back. She is DOUBLE HARD I tell you and after smacking her head into the chair and ground she gets up and hops back on for a lift back into the pits half blind from a concussion.
Out for qualifying and I'm buggered before we start, outlap, quick lap, in lap was the order for this one. Once again I come through the left after the hair pin and raise my hand in international symbol for pitting. Once bitten though and confident enough to look and make sure Alan knows what's going on and he realises just in time my intentions. This is about the time we figured out why he had no idea I was signalling, and we quickly come up with the plan that I'll let him know in a better spot from now on eh!
A replacement swinger is found for jay in the interim since he broke his last one, and we gas the bike up ready for race one that arvo. Might as well empty the can into it as the more weight out to the left the better yeah? Good idea!
Dave and Warwick are busy trying to source and replace a brake rotor on their LCR since they broke the last one, so the awesome field of 125gp kindly swap spots in the order for us to give them time to sort it. Warwick drove half way back to Christchurch though so they were too slow and didn't make the race.
Race #1
I get a wicked launch and we are off. Through turns one and two without incident, and around the sweeper onto the straight. Alan notices some fuel around the cap and makes note to keep an eye on the situation. By the time we come round the four left handers in a row there's litres of the stuff spewing out of the overflows and we have to pull in.
Turns out if you fill the tank to the top, the very cleverly designed little holes for the carb overflows to go straight back into the tank, allow quite a lot of gas back out when it surges in that direction. DNF
We pass the time on Saturday night keeping an eye on the rather dazed Maxine. Well.. I say we, but it was more just Jay fussing over her like a mother hen ,from feeling a touch bad about her injuries possibly being in small part due to him. Even though it IS always the swingers fault!
No sleep to speak of and Sunday arrives with no mercy at all.
We are up second in the order so we drain some gas, change the battery, get into our leathers and fit our swanky race shoes.
Race #2
I get a very good start and somehow end up in front of Dave and Warwick. OH SHIT, what the hell do I do now? They're gonna be trying to go fast and I'm kinda taking up quite a lot of track he's gonna want to use to actually race! We manage to negotiate turns one and two in the most imaginative lines possible and let Dave through into turn three. Right, now to hold Jay and Mason Denovan (the wring in) off for a mere 9 laps. (Incidentally that's more than twice as many as we've done in any one stint to date).
On lap three we come through the left after the hairpin to see a red flag, I back off and as we idle onto the straight, (fucked if I was gonna hook right without knowing damn sure Alan knew it was happening). About five meters after the start line we can see Warwick standing by the wall cradling his arm. "You fuckin beauty, that'll be a tray of piss from him"! Just kidding, that thought took at least ten minutes to register.
It's clear Warwick needs a trip in the big white meat wagon, so Jay kindly lends his wring in swinger to Dave, and we roll back out to form up the restart minus Jay.
Rest of this race is fairly foggy, except we managed to only get lapped by Steve and Denny. NZ No.1. I can handle that!
Race #3 and bloody Bron in his infinite wisdom has decided it'd be a good idea to make things more exciting for the punters. "Lets reverse the grid and start from the back with a split start".
I find this out five minutes before we head out, and have my objection ("are you friggin mental? That puts me right in front of every other bastard out there, and you guys are seriously fast"!) Completely ignored.
I warmed up to the idea though and there is a photo of Alan and I P fuckin 1 baby on the start grid!
We leave the line and dark horse Spike decides he might try this time. Squirts straight by me for the hole shot into turn one. Exit turn three and we're pretty much where we should be position wise, apart from Steve and Denny, and Adam and Stu who were starting with a handicap. That resolved itself on lap two or three and we were left to our own devices. We went as fast as we could for a while and dropped our times, but as we got tired there were a couple moments. So I started to have some fun! Picking the chair wheel up, and doing some skids. Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe hehehehehe!!!!!
What a friggin laugh, we left some good stripes on the track out of right handers from the tyre, and a couple blue stripes around the lefts from getting the chair wheel RIGHT in the air.
That about sums it up really for the action.
I need to thank a lot of people, Leanne for the use of the outfit, Alan for...Well everything mate! I am blown away at how awesome you have been all weekend and wish there was something I could do to repay you. Chrissie for your generous contribution and encouragement, Kevin and Katie Waugh for their contribution and kind offer to risk life and limb, Tony O'Kieth for contribution and humorous encouragment, Joanne and Warwick for contribution, encouragement and banana muffins! Does anyone else start to think we only seem to hang out with the best people ever yet? Ruth for contribution and encouragement, one who wishes to remain nameless for contribution and encouragement, Petca, Bob, and Mike for coffee, beer, smokes and munchies, and many others for support, advice, kind words, and yep....encouragement.
Also The office relocation company for assistance with the ferry booking.
And as always. TSS Red Barron, for anything motorcycle related, my only stop for anything I need for a bike.
I'm very tired and I know I'm forgetting people who helped, Jimmy with the setting up the bike for example.
You're all awesome, thank you SO VERY MUCH!!!!
Drew
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Originally Posted by scracha
Karma ... Justice catches up eventually !! 
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