Its taken me a while to post this but the 6th/7th August were my annual trip to Cadwell Park, a race circuit in Lincolnshire (some nice views from the air).
The Daytona coming into Coppice
Whilst I’m not sure I was going much quicker this year, I was a lot more comfortable to be doing what I was doing which was nice. Oddly I was also much more comfortable moving around the bike a bit this year, perhaps due to the offroad riding and being happier about the bike moving underneath me.
Piglets (the group I was in) did seem to have a few ‘interesting’ overtakes this year and the person who out braked themselves into Park and shot up my inside just as I was about to turn into the corner made life interesting. Thankfully they then went offline letting me turn into the corner and everyone survived. They also did find me and apologise which does make a difference.
On Friday we packed up and left quickly as I was booked into a TRF camping weekend in Yorkshire. This meant driving home, unloading the bikes, unpacking the van, loading the CRM and offroad stuff and catching a few hours sleep and then getting to North Yorkshire for 8am on Saturday.
I was pleased to actually manage that (who needs sleep!) and then spent a pleasant weekend riding around the North York moors 🙂 I was out with a number of friends from Northumbria TRF being led by the event Yorkshire event organiser.
The TRF runs were not without incident. 2 miles out on Saturday we had a puncture. The CRM was then miss firing like crazy so I tried changing the plug with no change. After going slowly up a steep hill on full throttle with no power I investigated further finding some rather soggy ECU connections, removed the water and rewrapped it in plastic. The bike started, sounded good and then died, not wanting to restart. We quickly discovered the plastic on the ECU was now sucked over the airbox inlet. Oops :). After application of tape, it ran fine.
Some lanes followed, then a relaxed pub lunch where it was noted my number plate and bracket were snapped off and missing. Hmm. We then headed back to the camp site with some concerns over the amount of fuel we had due to no fuel stop.
We went down an interesting very steep rocky descent which was heavily water eroded with large boulder obstacles. I’ve never been over anything quite like it before and was very pleased we were going downhill!
After some trips across some moorland it was then lots of downhill roads into the camp field. This was fortunate as the bike chose this moment to run out of fuel. I coasted down the hill and pushed it the remaining distance to the van. Beautiful timing 🙂
Whilst the day had been red hot, we spent the evening huddled around a fire watching video about the Ertsberg rally projected onto the side of a barn. There was also a steam train + dining car came by and a lovely stone bridge to watch it from.
The next day with the bike being refueled we headed out for a short run towards the coast. I managed to stall it in the ford next to the field which was a good start but kept my footing, restarted and got out. There was a steep muddy climb with some troublesome tree roots half way up which did cause me problems as I’d stopped at the bottom to close a gate. With a little assistance I did make it up eventually though :).
Things got better from there with other people falling off instead of me. I had to pull another CRM off the top of someone after he overtook me trying to show off :).
We stopped near Whitby for breakfast/lunch/icecream and then took to some lanes near Robin Hood bay. I took some photos here with the camera phone:
On the way out of there someone suffered a rear puncture meaning a tyre changing stop. A police car drove past, turned around, came back and stopped with the officers than questioning us on where we’d been. We eventually convinced them we’d been doing legal things and they were leaving when they spotted a bike missing its number plate (not mine). Thankfully they left with just a warning about getting it sorted and that there were traffic cops around on the nearby trunk road who would pull us for it.
This left a dilemma as there was a number in the group without plates but we decided to chance the main road and there was no traffic cops thankfully.
The rest of the trip back to the field went fine, we came up to another group and it was interesting to see some riders who were slower than me for a change! I was out with some rather good riders and the slowest there, as usual with my Northumbria TRF friends :/.
In the ford next to the field, the other CRM owner decided to drown his bike but at least we could tow him back onto the site to fix it. Several people seemed to have problems going through there this time and the water was significantly higher than that morning. I rode through without incident which was nice :).
This just left packing up and driving home which I eventually summoned the energy to do. I’ve been having problems with my energy levels recently, not helped by the flu thing I had and whilst I’m totally shattered, I did manage everything and came back home in one piece with working bikes! I only fell off twice on Saturday both just silly bike sideways, lie down under it things and didn’t come off on Sunday.
So an action packed four days, tiring but enjoyable and good fun!
Next up is the Northumbria TRF run into Kielder forest on the 22nd August.