cold and rusty....

The bemsee race school was designed to give total rookies a very good idea of how a race weekend with the club works. Some of the training was geared towards obtaining an ACU race license and the final part of the day is the written test to complete your application. I had already completed the test and already had my intermediate novice road racing license so a lot of the classroom instruction was covering old ground.

I travelled up to Mallory Park the afternoon before with all my kit in the van. I wasn't sure what I needed and as it turned out I had far too much with me for the day. I had been to Mallory before and completed track-days so I knew the layout of the circuit. I planned to sleep in the van overnight, on what turned out to be a very cold night (I'm sure there was ice inside the van the next morning!)

Sunday morning started with a visit to the scrutineers bay, just like a proper race weekend, and was taken very seriously even down to having to have the correct style of race numbers on the bike. Both my bike and race kit was checked and passed with flying colours, while others were sent away to make the necessary improvements. It was nice to know that everything was legal having built the bike over the previous summer.

The day was very well organised, all the riders were split into groups relevant to their bike classes and the split again into six riders with an experienced racer as an instructor. I was with Paul Gilbert, a knowledgeable and successful racer who will be competing at National level in 2007. We spent the day in the classroom as well as on track, with regular debriefs between sessions. It was cold but dry all day although that didn't stop a few crashing! The final session of the day was a chance for us to have a go at a proper gridded start. I, like everybody else, had not ever done one of these before and what a blast it was. We went thought he whole stating sequence from warm up lap to starting lights, finishing with three laps that we were not suppose to be racing, but....... The instructors started at the back of the grid and in seconds were within the pack calming and slowing it down which just goes goes to show how quick these guys are.

It was a good day, informative, very busy and well worth doing. Completing this day enabled me to race in the rookie 600 class in the coming season with the BMCRC. The Yamaha R6 which had only been out once in October since being built during the summer seemed to perform ok, although I felt incredibly rusty having not been on any bike for 3 months.
Next stop round one at Brands Hatch.