Chimay 2023
Words don’t often struggle to come to paper, but sometime things are hard. Whilst not people we knew Eddy Atisy and Eric Delrez both sadly lost there lives (in separate incidents) in solo races at Chimay. I have to say a huge thank you as always to the marshals and support staff who ensure that we can have fun out on track.
Trying to create some kind of upbeat report is always hard after a weekend like that, but I shall attempt to.
Friday started with the surprise of a huge grid 25 sidecars by our count. This gave us a problem as we could not be our usual last place, and had a great timed session with one of the other BMW sidecars, with us both dragging us along faster and faster! We had some interesting discoveries, that our power was not as down as we felt and that our gearing was about right. We spent a lot of time learning what on paper looked to be a very simple road circuit.
On Saturday for practice 2, something wasn’t quite right, and with a determined effort we managed to push ourselves beyond our abilities, resulting in having to lift the sidecar out of the gravel. The 17th on the grid secured from Fridays time.
The clean up operation did not take too long, and no lasting damage appeared to be done.
With the crazy early 9:20 start time (Having had an evening and lunchtime practice) with the sounds of the band from the previous night ringing in our ears we went out for race 1. Still no certain if we had damaged anything in the excursion the previous day. The start went awful (new lower first gear is still being machined to give us a chance) with us dropping back a few places, but then making them back again during the race. Sadly the slow start meant that we did not get to the back of the same group, and it was clear something was still upset on the bike with a lack of pull and quite a bit of ‘grumpy engine’….. Still we finished 16th.
The sidecar was checked again, and the decision made to change the brake pads and clean up the brake caliper as it seemed to have a slight stick. With some discussion of some different start tactics to actually use less grip on the rear wheel intended to be tried. Unfortunately the incidents mentioned already meant that we did not get to try these, and it was a quite reflective drive back home.
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