The journey from small guy to teenager...

[weeksy]

I think yesterday seemed to put some of the disappointment of the WC jersey stuff aside. Last night when we got home we did book another race, which is Fort William IXS. For information, IXS is the 2nd tier of International DH, it's like your WSB to get to MotoGP for example, a feeder class.
The only downside of this one is the logistics which means he'll be finishing his Psychology exam and we'll be jumping straight in the van and hitting the road up to Fort William. We'll miss the first practice on Friday, but he'll have a chunk of time on Sat to get to know it. Nothing we can do though, his exams have to be important too

The rest of things is a bit of a waiting game now, we've got to make a few decisions here for where and when to go racing, or whether we hold onto things for a bit and see what happens.

[Numnut]

Those times for yesterday are proper impressive, like you say, there's some big names there. Awesome stuff!

[weeksy]

As you'd expect the British Cycling thing has a few complexities with it, from registering with WBD to get a number, getting a UCI number, anti-drugs course to complete and then a load of ID verification etc. So that's all been done and we've officially accepted his place.
We now know the guys who are Primary and most of the Reserves and we're just waiting to see if anything comes up in the coming weeks, months etc regarding being offered a ride for an event.
It does make some aspects of things slightly tricky for us as we're kinda waiting and don't want to book something in a way for another Euro/International event as it starts getting pretty expensive then as well.

So next up is either the weekend of 10-12 April for Santigo de Besteiros in Portugal depending on whether we go there, that's an IXS/Continental round, so you'd argue Tier2 of racing. Top 3 in Juniors gets a 'golden ticket' which is an entry to 1 WC round.

If we don't go there (or even if we do actually) we've got the first GB NAtional on 18/19 April at Rhyd-Y-Felin in mid-north Wales. I guess to an extent this is where he now needs to bring his A-game as later in the year there's another allocation for riders for WC for the 2nd half of the year. If he puts it high up in the Nationals, then that helps his application for those WCs.

It's all tricky.

[weeksy]

[Nordboy]

Looks good.

I'm going to be the first one in though........gloves?

[weeksy]

Lol we need to move on. He's not a glove guy

[Dodgy69]

How often do the reserve lads get called up ? Could do with a few crashes.

[weeksy]

How often do the reserve lads get called up ? Could do with a few crashes.

Often is the answer. But there's multiple reserves and we have no clue on who's #1 or #4

[formula400]

He’s making that look proper easy… fair play too him

[Tricky]

Not been in this thread for a while and see I've missed quite a bit!

Hats off to James- big respect and fingers crossed for you all, give the boy a big manhug from me

[weeksy]

Excellent weekend for the boy, despite my reservations of his plans. This weekend was a 100% race, these are races at FoD which is arguably our local in many ways, it's where he knows and where he coaches.
Why did i have reservations, well, because he'd not entered it... This series has always been his bread and butter in terms of picking up early season points and rankings. But him and KAty and his fitness coach have different plans, goals and targets at the moment. There were a lot of FAST Juniors out racing, World Cup levels x 2 and other fast newcomers into Juniors. So in many ways i thought it would be good for him to go racing and see where he is.
However, he wanted a day of play on the Sat with a mate, just riding, hitting stupid lines, hitting daft gaps, racing up the hills against Ebikes and seeing where he could have a lot of fun.
Sunday was coaching first, then again it was play-time.

I kinda get where they're going with it all of course... but i really wanted to see where he stacked up this weekend. So i was a little torn on the plans.

I have no clue where he'd have finished of course, other than knowing that if he'd had a good run, he'd have been somewhere up there... but it was a fast fast day and a lack of grip, he could have ended the weekend anywhere in the top 6 really i think. All the juniors had the fastest times of the day, so the pace was hot.

Next up... i have no clue in honesty. We're waiting for confirmation of where his passport application is currently and debating Portugal in a few weeks... But... Dunno yet

[weeksy]

The very lucky and very fortunate boy has been complaining when swapping from bike to bike as he's hitting pretty bonkers stuff at the moment on his Trek Fuel.
"Brakes just are not up to it"

Which as they're a set of DB8 i can understand, they're a fairly budget brake.

So today arriving is a set of SRAM Maven Silver to go on his.


Should give him the stopping power he wants. Even though it's not his race bike, it's getting ridden pretty hard for a mess about bike.

The other side-benefit is that as well as the Mavens he's got 160 Lyriks on there, so if/when we head to a bike park, i'll take his bike instead of mine and get the MAvens/160s. Not that it'll make a huge difference to my skills... but we'll see

[weeksy]

Well that was a lunchtime fucking faff. Due to the Mavens being 'stealth' you can't actually fit the dropper lever clamp in the area you need it to be !!!

So what's the answer... well i tried it REALLY in... REALLY outside, i tried it everyhwere. I think the problem is that the clamp we have for the Bontrager lever is a conversion kit from a Shimano I-Spec to mount.

The only solution i could come up with was to fit a Hope lever we have here, the only reason it's not on the bike is because we suffered a lot with the cable slipping in the clamp point, so i've REALLY tightened it for him lol. This is MMX type so mounts directly into the SRAM band.

I've then also bought a One-Up dropper lever which i'll fit once it arrives and take off the Hope and sell it as i'm not as keen about it as i should be.

[weeksy]

Testing and timing laps today for him.

One of the tests was the 65mm bars. He gave a lot of input in terms of where they felt better or worse etc. Stability excellent but lacking slightly with cornering.
Experts say to drop the front fork pressure a bit or take off a couple of clicks of LSC but we didn't know thus until after.
Timed results show 0.9s quicker on a 1.25 track. So they'll deffo get more testing and playing.

[weeksy]

As well as bar testing on Sunday we also dialled in Vivid 2, making sure that's ready for the weekends racing when they come up fairly soon.

Sat was interesting too as he was running the SRAM Mavens on his trail bike, which were great apparently. But had the minor downside of splitting a sidewall on his Kryptotal rear and couldn't get it back on with a tube due to being a tight tight tyre. So he had to wait for us to get back down from our ride and sort it. I then gave him a bit of a lesson in tyre fitting which wasn't actually that hard. But the Krypto has been binned and an EXO+ Minion bought. He's currently got a Butcher T9 on there until the minion arrives.

[weeksy]

I/we have noticed a little bit of play from his front end lately.

So i swapped out the headset bearings for a new set, then tested and still there. Weird i thought. Tried a different front wheel, still there.
Then messed about with the spacers on steerer as it looked a smidgen short, still there.

I then fitted a spare set of Fox 36 we have here.... Gone...

What i think it is, is the Rockshox torque caps on the bottom of fork legs as we're not running them. we've just got standard 110x15 ends. It's the only sensible answer i have here really. So i've fitted the Fox 36 again for now, although that will lose him 10mm of travel. But shouldn't really worry him.

I'll think about the next step of the solution later.. Mmmmm

[crust]

Are you sure it's not worn bushes in the fork?

[weeksy]

100% certain. You can feel the play in certain areas, like the bottom.

[weeksy]

Oooft that went slightly wrong. Fitted the boy a new dropper lever, One up. Its lovely.

But then he wanted it adjusting over and the bolt died right away. Just rubbish soft metal. So I tried hammering in a Torc, no good.

We ended up having to drill it out. Which when you've got the shortest drill bits known to man, wasn't that easy.

But 10 min later it was done and a better bolt added.

[weeksy]

Yesterday was timing day at Merthyr Vale against George. We've been racing George (along with his dad Rich) for years and years now and they're always close at big (and small races)

According to the starts it's 16-10 in the boys favour in races. The boy has won the last 4 outings but not by much.

Track is super steep and tech according to the boys. They did a few runs to get their track knowledge then started on timing chips.

Run1.
James 1.18
george 1.22

Run2.
JAmes 1.13.42
George 1.13.11

Run3.
James 1.10.92
George 1.10.23

Run 4.
James 1.09.8
George 1.7.9

Run 5
JAmes 1.08.2
George 1.08.01

Run 6
James 1.06.00
George 1.09.5

The interesting one for us in particular was that Runs 5 and 6 were on the higher rise DMR 65mm bars. We've both been trialing these over the last few weeks and these cemented our thoughts, both of us are in favour of them on the bike in terms of feel and it seems in terms of speed. For full data we should have done 1-2 more on the lower bars really at the end. But time and plans ran away from us, so that was us done.

He was happy with the day of timing and felt good all day, as always he takes a few runs to dial himself in, but in the end he can put down a fast run which was great.
The only thing we have for direct comparison is George of course, who we know is quick. In a recent race at FoD he was 2.4s off the win on a similar time/length track. So i'm hoping the lad is somewhere in the right area for speed overall at the moment. But next weekend is full of all the UK big-hitters, the fastest and the best of the best.