Assen 2024

Finally we made our first race of the season. We unfortunately missed Hengelo, as Graeme had not finished his ear rebuild over the winter!

Talking of rebuilds we had many changes finalised on the sidecar, the oil tank finally moved out of the way, the new front end and brake changes, and a new race RV!

For once arriving early, part of the new keen way of doing things. With the goal of doing better than last year with a DNS in the end!

After finally passing scrutineering it was time for practice on Friday evening. We got ourselves 10 seconds faster than last year, with us both getting used to having more space and the tyres cleaning up from the modern rubber that had got stuck to them.

Saturday after lunch was the final practice. Sadly our time didn’t improve, and no we had not had the Frites by then (They were the post race reward!). We managed 22nd on the grid of 28.

Race 1 was our now becoming usual bad start due to having the wrong first still. Pretty soon though we did something that hadn’t occurred for us in the whole of last season, with having steering and brakes we caught the back of the field. Having caught them we had a big dice, and eventually ended up 17th of the 22 finishers 7th in class!

Much debate was had as to if we should change anything, the first time we had felt the need for more power AND wanted to change the final drive ratio but had not bought the taller gearing, so all was left as was bar changing the pads.

Sunday mornings race was soon upon us. Again we had the start issue with the too tall first gear. We made it back to Henk again (13 above) but this time got passed a lot quicker than on the Saturday. Unfortunately we chased hard to get to the next sidecar but they had made too big a gap (and we had made too many very minor mistakes). In a stroke of consistency 17th over all and 7th in class again. With the joys of the data we get at Assen our fastest lap was just 0.4 seconds off the theoretical fastest lap we could have achieved.

Yes we did celebrate with Frites! And collected our trophy very happily. A very successful weekend of experimentation and progress! The brakes worked for the whole race (just about on the 2nd race), the steering worked for the whole race, and the new RV worked too!


Posted in 2024, race, Sidecar by with no comments yet.

Leave a Reply