BRITISH NAT CHAMPS - rheola forest - WALES July 16, 2007
Posted by paulwalton in : Uncategorized , trackbackHere is a summary of the very wet British National champs from 2007. My trip over was pretty easy this time, flight from Nice to
Bristol where I was welcomed by Tracy and a lot of rain! We drove east to the welsh coast near Swansea and then headed inland toRheola
Forest. It rained all day Friday and turned the track into a river. I walked the track with
Tracy, up and down (no chairlift here) and decided by the end that a canoe would have been better than my boots!!!
The tech site was a far cry from what we normally have at a high level race like this,
Tracy and I spent 2 hours scraping mud and digging a moat to try and get a dry patch to position ourselves for the weekend.
On a more positive note, the track was top class, with some high speed loose rocks at the start, then some technical slippery woods sections, jumps, north shore and a good gradient. We setup everything on Sat morning with the help of Ian Collins we had a pretty dry and organised pit to work from. A quick change of tyres and suspension settings and
Tracy was ready for practice, she went for Wet Scream’s to start with to make sure she could get down ok. As the day progressed, the rain eased up and the track started getting more slippery as the mud dried and turned to greasy clay. By the end of the day it was a tough call on tyres so
Tracy opted to go for the faster intermediate tyres as it looked like she would be using them for race day. This turned out to be a good choice as it forced her to take safe lines and conserve her energy on the pedalling sections. She had a good run and took the win in the seeding run 5sec ahead of Helen Gaskell.
Sunday brought lots more rain and the first hour of the day was spent trying to drain our pit area. Practice went well and the track had actually gotten faster due to the extremely wet conditions, the most difficult part was vision, plenty of tear-offs were going to be needed for the Final.
Tracy was the last girl down and the conditions were dismal, she managed a good run and attacked where she needed to, she managed to hit all her lines and avoid all the trees which littered the track. She commented that removing tear-offs was a really tough job on this track due to its technical nature so she had a few sketchy moments in the process. Overall it was a clean run and she posted the fastest time with Helen Gaskell in 2nd place. So a good weekend for us, well done to
Tracy and Thanks for all the help from Ian, especially his exceptional skills in jet was repair and hose-sucking!!!
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