Ric tackles the Tickertape Triple Crown

Ric McLaughlin | Blog, Mountain Biking Uk | 19/10/2010 10:26am

DH Racing, Jim – but not as we know it…

On Sunday morning I had two choices – go and race my bike or spend a day spending money in Homebase before returning home to spend hours decorating. Simple really.

We’d been on a shoot with Chris Smith earlier on the week and he’d mentioned that he, Chopper and Jim Davage amongst others were all off to a race at Longleat on Sunday hosted by the Black Cannon Collective. I gave Chris a bell, got directions and stuck the Transition Covert in the car.

This was going to be my first DH race and I couldn’t have picked a better event – everyone was really sound, it only cost a tenner and I even got a number board made out of a paper plate.

The riding was tricky though, there were three tracks with an hour on each during which you had to record a time. The person with the quickest cumulative time by 4pm was the winner.

I worked myself out an equation pretty early on of five runs per track broken down into one cruisy ‘sighting’ run, then three to build up speed and the fifth being a timed one.

The first one was a bit of a mare as I managed to lose my chain half-way down and couldn’t take advantage of the Covert’s light weight and great pedalling in the open bottom section. Still though, I was down in one piece.

The second track was a lot more fun and featured a gap drop, some nice turns and a mini rock garden. By now I was enjoying myself and had what in my head felt like the quickest run I’d managed on my timed. It wasn’t and it was still a good few seconds of the pace. Swearing.

The last track was long, flowing and relied heavily on hitting a couple of sandy berms just right. I lost a clip half-way down and managed none of the above. In my defence though, I did put a big old sideways in in the mud of the final turn for the highlight reel. Sadly though, there was no highlight reel.

I’d survived and drove home with a mixed bag of emotions – I’d ridden smoothly if not well yet I was still happy to have come away feeling good about the race. More racing this winter? Yeah, definitely!

Also worth noting though was just how good the Covert was – smooth, agile, grippy, easily picked up, slack, quick and long. Oh yeah, and I rode it all day XC the day before. What a bike – what a time to be alive!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at 10:26 am and is filed under Blog, Mountain Biking Uk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.