NBT- I'm going racing 😳

[KungFooBob]

Darley Moor is a shit hole.

Those bogs have an opaque corrugated roof, that way they don't need any lights.

Take a torch if you want a piss in the dark.

[Tricky]

– the facilities, however wasn’t one of the good ways

I've seen (and used) far, far worse!

In fairness, I have too

[Bustaspoke]

I don't want to put a downer on things,but listening to Jamie Witham's podcast the other day he said that Darley Moor & other former airfields are now classed as brownfield sites & planning permission is going in to turn Darley Moor into a housing estate

[weeksy]

I don't want to put a downer on things,but listening to Jamie Witham's podcast the other day he said that Darley Moor & other former airfields are now classed as brownfield sites & planning permission is going in to turn Darley Moor into a housing estate

And that's going to upset him? I think he'd be more upset if they keep it as a track

[Tricky]

I don't want to put a downer on things,but listening to Jamie Witham's podcast the other day he said that Darley Moor & other former airfields are now classed as brownfield sites & planning permission is going in to turn Darley Moor into a housing estate

Definitely no downer from me- this was the PR released by the club back in Jan.


it's inevitable IMO, there is no way I can see that someone could make it safe and desirable enough for anyone apart from club racers (grantrf, and the likes of McPint and Spud ) to race there without spending an absoloutely huge amount of money (and that's assuming PP would be granted), which means it's money-making value is extremely limited and relatively small, so yeah, as soon as some housebuilder manages to find the right people to accept acceptable backhanders , oops I mean gets the right incentive then yep, it'll be history
Which is of course is the way of the world , and not always a bad thing...

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

Isn't Darley Moor the arse end of nowhere, who's going to buy a house up there, Ashbourne is hardly a boom town

[KungFooBob]

Isn't Darley Moor the arse end of nowhere, who's going to buy a house up there, Ashbourne is hardly a boom town

People who like to visit Alton Towers a lot?

[Sunny]

I did my first ever track day at Darley Moor, I have fond memories of the place

[Tricky]

Well, I’m writing this report a good bit later than I said I would, but April was a busy month, as was May TBH and pretty much non-stop , but we’ve been busy enjoying ourselves, which is what retired life is all about IMO

So , since my last update, we’ve had the Cadwell round on the weekend of 18-19th April and the Anglesey one too on the 9-10 May, and Pembrey too last weekend so I have been very tardy on the reporting...

In my defence though, in addition to those three meetings, I’ve also had a cracking weekend on the old orange bike down on the lanes of Devon with @crust and most of the rest of the Jolly boys, Isabella and I have also had a long weekend in Portugal , a week away on the big red bike in France and a fair bit of house and other stuff too, and I consider myself very fortunate
Anyway, that’s not what this thread is about, so back to the racing!

Cadwell was quite an interesting and eventful one- as usual, we travelled up there on the Thursday to get set up for test day friday and racing Saturday.
There was a No Limits bike trackday there on the Thursday, which as they also had the evening booked meant that we (NG Racing) couldn’t get access until after 8pm, so I invested £55 to book on to the evening track-day to ensure that I got a decent spot in the paddock- I was glad that I did as even arriving at 4pm for the TD, the non-grass bits of the paddock was already full, and there was a big line of NG racer campers and caravan queuing to get in, even though they wouldn’t be admitted until 8pm…

After a bit of shenanigans, managed to sort a reasonable space down in the bottom row, which was good, managed to get set up and retired off to Mrs Miggins (otherwise known as the Beaumont Hotel )in Louth for the night.

Friday test day was largely uneventful in terms of weather and on-track activity, except the bike (TB as it was dry all day) just seemed a bit flat compared to how it had felt at Darley a week or so earlier- no misfiring , rough running, strange noises or anything like that, it just felt a bit lacking at the top end .
Without a dyno to strap it to on Friday, or a race situation I wasn’t sure whether it was just in my head, or something lacking on the bike, so I didn’t worry too much and just got some laps in, ahead of qualifying the next morning.

But what was a real nice surprise on friday was for @Couchy to appear!
I haven’t seen the old boy for a good while, he was looking good and in top form, at Cadwell supporting Wilson Dilks, a young and arguably very much up and coming star of the future IMO that Couchy has been supporting for a good few years now, since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, as the saying goes.
If you haven't already heard of him, Wilson really is a talent.
I think he’s 11 or 12 YO now but been racing since he was 6 , has progressed through the mini bikes and Italian Ovahle 250 championship, he is competing this year in the ESBK (basically European Moto4 on 250 Hondas). It was his first time at Cadwell, and he was competing in the UK Junior Series, which a new class launched by NG this year for 12 to 17 year-old.
The main aim of the class is to fill a current UK gap and provide a UK-circuits stepping stone from mini-bikes to the R&G Moto4 on "large wheel" restricted bikes for young uns - basically the current Honda NSF250F (Formerly British Talent Cup Machines and Moto4 ) with a restrictor plate in the inlet, and some Metrakit and Beon 2-strokes.

And Wilson smashed it, completely smoking the opposition with a good 3 or 4 seconds a lap on his closest competitor, lapping in the 1:42s, on a 30 HP (max) bike which if you have chased laptimes around Cadwell, you'll have some appreciation of how fast that is- definitely a name to watch in the future, fingers crossed he’ll be spotted and get sufficient backing to allow him to develop to his full potential, I'm rooting for him

Anyway, back to me- Saturday morning weather was slightly chilly due to the wind, but nigh on perfect , qualifying came around and out I went.
I was a good second off my FL last year (that was on my original bike), which perturbed me a little as with my new 10kg lighter and non-alcohol polluted body I was expecting to be faster, but everyone ( except Harley , suprise suprise ) was a bit slower, but it still qualified me 3rd LNSB (just , by 0.2sec) and 1st Vet ( by 0.6sec) , so that will do.
We were sharing the grid with the Minitwins lot again, so overall it put me 11th on the grid.
Race1 was a slightly disappointing one for me, I got a good start but whacked and duffed up a fair bit in Coppice (the first corner) , managed to recover and knock a second off my qualifying time but had no hope of catching the the first two Bandits, crossing the line 3rd Bandit, but 1st vet, so decent result.
Coming back in, all Bandits were diverted straight to the dyno in park ferme for checking- apparently it’s happening at every round for us this year.
And quite eventful that was, for more reasons than one!
There has a fair bit of bashing and barging in this race, and on reaching park ferme, it immediately boiled over between my two closest (non-vet) rivals with them squaring up to each other and having to be separated- a shame, but it happens, and in this particular instance there is history between them which resulted in broken bones for one of them last year so I guess understandable to an extent.
Anyway, they were separated and the immediate situation diffused, albeit it has had some knock-on effects for me in addition to a few of the Bandits, more of which later….

As for the dyno runs, the actual machine agreed with my arse-dyno, with mine logging 4.5HP less than it did at Brands on the same dyno, putting me just about the bottom of the pile in terms of HP (69.9 for anyone interested) with everyone else’s on par with their Brands results.
Hmmmm, some further investigation needed – at the circuit that was limited to looking at the plugs (all looked good) , pulling the back of the airbox off to check that we hadn’t ingested any woodland creatures or anything else that shouldn’t be there (all good too), and that rear brake wasn’t binding or anything like that.
And therein a found a problem, with bad and unusual wear on the inside of the rear sprocket and a small bit of play (again ) in the rear wheel bearings.
I whipped the rear wheel out and one of the bearings fell out- admittedly when I’d replaced them at Brands , one of them had needed very little persuasion to come out, and went in easier than I was completely happy with, but it wasn’t like this.
As a trial solution to save me swapping tyres between rims here, I managed to buy some bearing-fit ( for anyone who doesn’t already know, it’s sort of like Loctite/ thread- locker only a bit thicker) to put the bearing back in with a good helping and left it overnight to harden before putting it back in

All seemed good on Sunday, so it went back in, the weather was good, and I got two more first in class, despite being sideswiped and put across the grass by a Kamikaze CB500 in the last race, but I was 3rd LNSB across the line again in both so a decent weekend for me, if not so much for quite a lot of people there- I’ve never seen so many offs at one corner (the top of the Gooseneck), perhaps as although the weather was pretty decent, the track temperature was apparently unusually cold, and so much so that every race on the Sunday was given two warm-up laps instead of the usual one, not that it seemed to help really!

I didn’t get any video and very few pics, but here’s what I have






And a couple of Slim, one of my LNSB vet rivals, during and after his Gooseneck off





Next round is ( or more accurately “was” )Anglesey on the weekend of 9-10 May, which is now in the distant past as I am writing this on 3rd July, but more of that, and the Pembrey round (both crackers with plenty of action ) to follow shortly, or at least what I can remember of it will !