Trip 3: May 1999
If you're wondering why this report is much longer, it's because someone else was doing the driving back and I was able to spend part of Belgium typing up the trip report on my palmtop ...
After two car trips, we thought it was about time to bring the bikes. The constants in the equation were once again the SIDC, Adamanda and me. This time we were accompanied by KeeWei and Clinton.
We weren't keen to repeat the trailer experience. I was all for riding over, but Adamanda and KeeWei wanted to wimp out and take vans. James Denning and John Greystrong bravely offered their race-vans, so I gave in. Adamanda took James' TART (Teamixion Awesome Race Transporter) and KeeWei and I took John's BART (Better Awesome Race Transporter).
Thursday was a little chaotic. My flight back from Edinburgh was delayed, so I had a rushed trip out to John Greystrong's place to pick up his stereo (which seemed to have some kind of white van attached to it).
We'll gloss over me nearly leaving my helmet at John's place, and separately making the first Mandatory Ixion Run U-turn just a few hundred metres into the journey, and mention instead John's bare-faced lie that getting the bike up the ramp into the van is easy: it's not, it's bloody terrifying. Although we did later find that it's much easier with four people.
BART (Better Awesome Race Transporter)
BART with KeeWei's Blade (left) and my CBR6
The bike-securing system, though, looks reassuringly ... well, secure. We're halfway through playing with John's shiney new ratchets when Adam phones to say that he's just taken delivery of TART. Due to mobile phone interference, we picked up someone else making some rude remarks about someone else's borrowed van.
TART (Teamixion Awesome Race Transporter), a bit of a tighter
squeeze
Bike secured, John's cheery 'any problems, call my mobile, you won't get through though cos I'll be in the Lake District' ringing in my ears and it's off back down the A12 to discover the delights of steering so vague you're doing well if you can keep it pointed towards the correct continent.
Home, and time to botch a connecting lead between my camcorder cigarette-lighter adapter and the power from the Chilli heated waistcoat socket. While I don't do spanners, I do very occasionally botch electrics, my most famous example being when I was thown across a room after a minor misunderstanding about whether the socket I was rewiring was on Circuit A or Circuit B (it was on Circuit A, as was 240 volts and 13 amps). Anyway, a quick test shows it to have been a successful botch, so BikeCam is go (digital camcorder batteries only last 30-40 mins each). :-)
The next morning KeeWei arrives in loads of time to load his bike, so we have time for a cuppa and to show KeeWei the Ring in the form of my new improved Easter edition CarCam footage (not the crappy old version you may eventually see on the Ixion1998 video when it's released early in 2007).
Arriving at the SeaCat terminal in Dover, we're told that our crossing has been cancelled and that we'll now be travelling from a different port to a different port and at a different time. There is no hint of an apology about this. Two SeaCat crossings for Ring trips, two cancelled crossings, one obvious conclusion for future trips. :-|
On board the SeaCat, now from Folkestone to Bologne and half an
hour late ...
The journey there is excruciatingly slow. We can manage 80mph on downhill stretches, but 70 is about top-whack on the flat and we spend an awful lot of time heading up slight slopes at 50mph. TART also has a small petrol tank, making the following a familiar sight:
Adam filling up TART ... again!
We really should have just ridden straight there ...
Then the heavens open. I guess you'll need to wait until about 2035 to see the VanCam footage of the storm on the Ixion1999 video, but believe me that no waterproofs are that waterproof. Suddenly vans look like a brilliant idea. And there's no comparison with the previous trailer trip -- John's tie-down system is superb, both bikes remaining rock-solid. (Sorry, Fizzy!)
We arrived at the B&B at 00:30, having arranged en-route for our keys to be left out. A good night's sleep and then up at the crack of dawn (cough) to offload the bikes and go do the Ring thing. :-)
Having done the Ring twice by car, and thinking both times that the bikers going round must have balls of, well, whatever this month's fashionable strong alloy is (are we still on titanium, or is that passé in May?), I viewed the trip with a mixture of excitement and abject terror. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that when you're actually out there the doses of sheer blinding panic are restricted to the occasions when you've comprehensively fucked up. Well, those and the odd stupid overtake, anyway.
There's just no comparison between car and bike out there. With the MX-5, the driver was capable of going faster than the car (except on the exit from Brünchenn!); with the CBR600, the bike was capable of going much faster than the rider.
I did a gentle lap first to warm up tyres, engine and brain, and found that the basic level of track knowledge that comes from having done about 30 car laps (ie. which direction the track goes, and how tightly, plus a general awareness of the turn-in points for about one bend in 10) was enormously reassuring.
Straight out for lap 2, everything nicely warmed up, and I up the pace a bit. The Ring is a totally different circuit on a bike, with far fewer straights! There's one section just past the Niki Lauda bend (no official name, apparently, but everyone knows it as the bend where NL has his big crash) where I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the bike is heeled over to the left for about 1/4 mile. It's pretty much four separate bends in the MX-5 but one long multi-apex one on a bike.
I'd put new rubber on the bike especially for this trip, with the hope that they'd also make it through Son of Cadwell, in the form of a BT56 rear and a BT56SS front. They are absolutely superb. Loads of grip and plenty of feel -- exactly what I needed to give me confidence.
I'd been concerned about mixing it with some of the *very* lairy car drivers out there, but whereas the MX-5 was being overtaken by half the circuit, this time it was just the faster locals. Bikes were another matter, with some blindingly quick guys out there, but vanishingly few dodgy overtakes --one notable exception being the guy who went round the outside of me, knee down-ish, and actually brushed me with his knee.
I soon settled into a routine of doing one warm-up lap, gradually picking up the pace as I went, followed by a hotter lap immediately afterwards, then park up for tea and swapping tall tales about acts of derring-do. Actual derring-do was strictly limited by ritual incantation of the magical DFC phrase, the sight of at least one new crashed vehicle every other lap and the two occasions when the track was closed to allow the ambulance to attend to serious smashes. In the second of these, paramedics were performing CPR on the victim (we heard later that he survived).
I followed Clinton for one lap on his new Blade, unfortunately the BikeCam switching itself off soon after we set off (later cured with a piece of -- what else -- gaffa tape).
We did try for a 'team' lap, the four IxiVannies going round together, but Amanda gave up on keeping up with me, I gave up on keeping up with KeeWei, and KeeWei gave up on keeping up with Adam, so our formation lap didn't last long. :-) I did, though, later get some excellent footage of Adam, knee down, overtaking me on the approach to Brünnchen. He did the approved Continental-style 'thank you' wave with his right foot.
I did about 14 laps on the Saturday -- more than I thought I'd do on the bike -- but by 5.30pm my concentration was suffering, evidenced by a deterioration in my lines, so I took the hint and called it a day. KeeWei and I bimbled round on the back road to Adenau and did a bit of spectating there (almost causing an Adamanda crash by waving at them ...).
Saturday night was, of course, Grillhaxe and Weisenbier time, but first came the obligatory hooking the camcorder up to the hotel room TV to relive those magic moments. :-) I'd discovered that filming a lap sometimes tempted one into pushing a bit harder, so only videoed about a few laps. Watching them afterwards I was pleasantly surprised.
One of the benefits of filmed footage is that you can pull off lap-times at your leisure, so since I drove out and KeeWei is driving back (I'm writing this in the van in Belgium), I decided to spend some of Belgium reviewing video footage. Interestingly, I could find naff-all correlation between my subjective impression of speed during a lap, how impressive it looked on video and actual lap-times. What felt and looked like a slow lap was actually quite fast, while what felt like a flying lap was disappointingly slow.
But while I didn't exactly manage to put Helmut wothisname's 7:49 lap record at risk, I was pleased to see that I broke the magic 10-minute barrier with a 9:57. Given that Adam gave me a one-minute head-start one lap, and overtook me the approach to Brünnchen, I reckon that gives him grounds for some quite impressive claims (and means he should definitely piss off out of the middle group at Cadwell :-)) ...
I took the BikeCam off on Sunday morning so that Phil Gardner, one of the Ring instructors, could stick it on his R1 for a lap, but sadly there was so much traffic out there (most of it bikes) that it was way off his usual pace. Incidentally, Phil gave testament to just how much torque R1's have when he announced that he'd done one entire lap in 6th gear!
All-in-all, an amazing trip! In fact, I'm trying hard to think of any low-points apart from the tedious drive there and back, and the only one I can come up with is Amanda giving herself a hard time because she wasn't feeling confident and was thus not going anything like as fast as she's capable of (and seemingly missing the point that she'd safely navigated her bike round the Ring, something which most bikers -- whatever their own opinion of their abilities -- will never do).
So ... five Ixies, five bikes and two vans went to the Ring, and nobody crashed!
Thanks to Adamanda for organising stuff, KeeWei for a relaxing drive back and James & John for the loan of their respective vans.
Copyright © Ben Lovejoy 1999