What an eye opener we experienced over there. Went to a track the previous Saturday called Gilmann Speedway, a meeting we were hoping to compete at this being part of the reason we flew the bike over as well as getting maximum track time before we left, politic’s prevented us from racing but what a show very fast, hooked up with a guy called Ronnie Parker and his team (these chap’s finished 4th at the gold cup) they made us very welcome so much so we got lost getting home, at the Gold Cup anything we didn’t have i.e compressor etc we could help ourselves, cheer’s guy’s much appreciated.

The Gold Cup itself had a sit down dinner on the Thursday night with speeches from the official’s, meet a few of the other competitor’s most of them where pretty good to talk to, you could tell the one’s early who were up themselves just like some of the competitor’s in the 4 wheel section here. So on to the practise on the Friday night and out first was the defending champion’s, F%^K fast Palmy is 440 meter’s long it take us 1 minute 18 to do 4 lap’s Wayville where the Gold Cup was held was 530 meter’s long these guy’s went round in a minute 20 for 4 lap’s. Our first lap in our first practise we where going backward’s into the wall (can laugh now we brought it back the right way and carried on) so back to the pit’s made a couple of changes and went alot better in our 2 following practices.

Our Kiwi team mate’s suffered engine damage so much so that they had to put another engine in the next day (good effort guy’s). So to the final’s day no one was going to beat the Aussie’s as the outcome was to prove, most of them had two bike’s at the track some of them had three bike’s in their team, their top bikes costing between 35 and 40,000 Aussie dollar’s each.

There were nine oversea’s bike’s in the field felt pretty confident we could give them a good run for there money, our point’s telly say’s we didn’t if we where able to get around the corner’s we would of that’s my story anyway!! Have to say a huge thank’s to John Moxom who crewed for us over the weekend (the guy’s knuckle’s were bleedy changing tyre’s this was at the end of every run we did cheer’s mate top man) Stu Carey doing our helmet colour’s keeping the bike clean topping the radiator up between races and what ever else that had to be done.

Once again everyone that helped us to get there be it financial, mechanical (cheer’s champ) support at the track, support from home can’t thank you all enough. To summarise it was a huge learning curve , an experience not to miss glad we got the chance to do it, would we do it again yes, but at the very minimum you would have to do at least two month’s racing with them and have the horsepower they did see you at Wanganui on Sunday

Cheer’s Handbag

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 3:51 pm and is filed under FIM Gold Cup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.