Been a quiet week on the cycling, bit of a rest/recovery sort of thing for the week. It's been pretty intense in the past few months, so a rest was welcome for both of us.
We're heading to Tiverton tomorrow morning for a weekend at Southern Enduro. Got the full team racing including the boss. The boy is still a DH racer but at times we have a bit of a play in Enduro land. It was a slightly complex one for us this weekend as it clashes with the Llangollen Gravity race which would have been decent pratice for the National DH at Llangollen in a few weeks time, but the lad was given the choice and wanted to do team stuff instead of just practicing the DH track. I thought that was exceptionally good of him to put the team ahead of just himself.
Both the bikes are ready to roll, we've still been playing with the pressures/settings on the 141 as we're not quite there yet, but some changes from the boss a few weeks ago and a bit of dropping of pressures from me and we're getting his bike closer to where he wants it. It's now got some Race Matrix Uberbike pads in there and a slightly different bleed to try and get the lever throw/position closer to his RSCs, but obviously we can't quite get them 100% the same due to lever design. In the ideal world we'd have the same on both, but with them being a chunk of change along with the cost of the incoming Specialized Demo i just can't justify the extra expense currently.
It's been interesting chatting with him in the past few weeks with things like the Lenzerheide and Leogang stuff on along with some other stuff on Redbull TV and the Enduro series coverage. I've been subtly quizzing as to whether he still wants purely a DH Race future and the answer is 100% yes. We were watching Cam McCaull and Gee Atherton on a prog who were doing pure Freeride stuff, but it didn't seem to grab him.
It's also been interesting to see the different paths the team are taking this year after all starting with the same goals of racing Pearce and Nationals, the boy is the only one now who'll be competing in the Nationals for the rest of the season and potentially onwards from there.
I know it's come up a few times in other posts about financing all of this and if i'm completely honest, i block 99% of the thoughts out.. but yeah at times it can be a bit on the tough side, but we're doing OK and can continue as we are for the forseeable future if that's what he wants and where he wants to go with it all. IF the time comes where we head out of the UK to race, well that's a whole different level of funding and we'd need to work out a few plans and priorities there, but i don't see that being next season (unless we did a 1 off race) so we'll worry about it if it even comes about.
The one thing we could really do with most is a tyre sponsor, we'd like to experiment more with rubber choices, compounds, treads etc on both bikes, but there's only so much you can do when they're £60-80 a throw. But other than that, we're happy, enjoying it all and having lots of laughs.. It's been challenging with some of the weather, locations and mostly the bloody mud this year... but we're in a bit of a sweet spot currently with BBQ, camping, laughs, beers... So we're both happy
