Yesterday I went along to the Classic Trials Show at Stoneleigh on an invite from Charlie Prescott who was involved in putting the event on. The sections had been marked out by Mick Andrews and Alan Witton and although I was quite sceptical and expected a bit of an arena trial the sections were actually quite good and a 'real' trial was put on!
The format was a new one, certainly for me, with a few changes to what we are used to;
1. 10 sections, 4 laps like normal however following a riders briefing all the riders had to walk the course and look at the sections. Once the walk through was complete you were not allowed to look at the sections again and had to ride them as you found them.
2. Scoring reverted back to the old scoring with 0,1,3,5 being the scores so a 2 would count as 3 marks (like it used to be they tell me!)
3. On 2 sections there was a yellow gate that made the section harder - if you chose to ride the yelow gate and cleaned the section then you would actually score -1. If you dropped marks the score would stand as normal.
4. Riders were set off in intervals to ride alone and a time limit of 1hr 15mins was allowed for all 4 laps.
I think this worked quire well, except the fact that all riders walked the course in the morning and the invited riders event did not start till about 3pm after the morning event and sidecars had run and the rain had come down, so a second course walk was allowed and plenty of waiting around for the event to start (bit like waiting for your race in moto x, which I also hated as I just want to ride the bike!)
Once we got going it was great fun. The sections became quite slippery and 3 or 4 of them were a challenge for even the best riders (except Len Hutty it would appear!).
I got off to a steady start with dabs on each of the 3 opening sections that were the most difficult of the trial, then a couple of slack dabs where I had underestimated how slippery some of the cambered turns were. That was the story for the first 2 laps, at the end of which I think I was on about 9 marks. Then on section 3 on the 3rd lap I messed up a tricky ditch through a muddy slot and landed back in the mud on my back with the bike on top of me for my first 5. The rest of the trial was pretty smooth except section 5, which was a grassy cambered turn that fell foul to a heavy downpour of rain and became like a skating rink - I lost a further 6 marks here and ended up on 23 marks for the day. Not too bad but certainly not in the hunt for the £500 first place money...
I heard the provisional results this evening suggesting that Len Hutty won on -2 marks which was amazing!!! he was followed by Rob Bowyer, Dave Wood, Neil Gaunt, someone from north of the border and then me in 6th place. I am pretty happy with that result considering the class of the field.
I will post the final results when I get them. The pics are from the event.
Just got the results after a week!
1. Len Hutty -2
2. Rob Bowyer 2
3. Dave Wood 5
4. Neil Gaunt 6
5. Alastair Stewart 18
6. Dave Dawson 23
7. Chris Haigh 24
8. Norman Shepherd 33
9. Andy Bamford 34
10. Alan Wright 36
11. Jim Pickering 44
12. Chris Gascoigne 48
13. Mark Parry Norton 54
14. Tony Sullivan 63
15. Steve Ransom 73
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