This was our last CRMC meeting of the year and what an unbelieveable year it has been!
I was looking forward to Cadwell after a disasterous Snetterton and was hoping that we might have a trouble free weekend with a bit of good luck thrown in.
Me and Ed both like Cadwell, in fact that’s an understatement, we both love Cadwell. The weather was dry, but cold and cloudy, it didn’t matter though cos I had a good feeling about the days events.
We went out in practice and got going straight away, we had a lot of catching up to do. Our braking problems seemed to have vanished and for the first time in a couple of months we were enjoying being back out on the bike again. Practice went really really well, Mogli thought we were the fastest out there so it was good news all round. We had a long wait now until our first race, in fact our only race of the day.
We were starting from the front row for the race, not pole but good enough. We got off to a reasonable start but Matt Kingsmill had got the better of us, we followed him round and right through the gooseneck where we were both really on our limit, we got the better of Matt on the brakes into Mansfield. We knew we were quick through the woodland section and pulled out on Matt quite a lot. After two laps Matt had disappeared and we had a lonely race to the chequered flag.
We were both dead chuffed with our results especially after such a crap string of results in previous weeks. I was so chuffed I practically ran to the bar 
We had a good night on Saturday in the bar, there was a band on who were absolutely top notch. I ended up dancing on a table spilling every drink going including my own! I expected to get a bollocking from Ed who was watching closely but by the end of the night he was up dancing himself!!!!
Sunday was going to be a busy day for us. We were the first race of the day which was a shock for us as it was an early start. We were on pole for this race which was good, not that it makes too much of a difference at Cadwell cos it’s such a long run to the first corner. We didn’t get a very good start again and was behind Matt and John Perkins this time. We got Matt fairly quickly but it took us a little longer to get Perky. Again though we did him on the brakes going into mansfield…. ive never braked that hard into there, the back wheel was squirming all over the place and when we did get into the corner the chair must’ve been 2 and a half foot in the air…. shit! Ed was on a mission now to get away from Perky and we had another lap of squirming all over the place and getting the front wheel off the ground going over the mountain. We managed to pull out on Perky on the third lap so I squeezed Ed to knock it off and again we had a lonely race to the finish.
Race of the Year was probably the least exciting race of the weekend for us. We led from the start and didn’t see anyone all race… i didnt mind though as I could relax a little bit and save my arms.
The last race of the weekend was the handicap race. We won that last year and it’s always exciting. We had an impossible task ahead of us though as we were starting 2 minutes and 5 seconds behind the first couple of bikes. Not to worry though we were going to give it a fair old go. We passed Colin Lewis who had started a second in front of us on the second lap going into the esses before the mountain, we always managed to pass a couple more bikes here on the same lap and I actually thought we might be in with a shout. However, that was to be short lived… we got to Hall Bends and oily water started to pee out everywhere, we had done a head gasket so pulled into the pit lane and the was weekend over for us.
Despite doing a head gasket, I was chuffed to bits with how are weekend had gone, we had a new personal best round Cadwell and some fantastic results. Unfortunateley our results over the weekend weren’t enough to clinch the title and we lost out by one point.
We will be at the Festival of Sidecars at mallory Park on October 30th/31st if anyone fancies it. We’ll be out the F2 and the classic so it’d be well worth a trip down.
Vics
