Where to begin with the weekend... I guess we'll start on Friday. We drove up to Rhyd-Y-Felin in great weather, stopped for some food, a sandwich and a coffee, just a relaxing jaunt up there really. Weather was nice. Stopped in at a bike shop on the way (more on that later).
Got to track, unloaded, set up gazebo and went on track walk, it's rough, rooty, rocky, steep, natural, loamy, grassy.. oh yeah jumpy too and wet. That about sums it up, but it's the National Championships so it really should be. It was then BBQ, beers, chatting in the paddock and saying hello to our riding mates and parents.. Awesome evening until about 10.30pm when it started raining... which continued from Fri night until Sun about 10am without really stopping, it was the fine mist type rain but with some bigger rains in there, every now and again you'd think "yay it's stopped", but not really.
IMG_20230721_182903 by
Steve Weeks, on Flickr
All of this of course meant Sat practice was wetter than wet. ALL day... it was bike washing, new gloves, new goggles, bike washing, HotXbuns, bike washing, new kit... Just relentless. But the boy finished the day happy and having had fun. He'd been on his backside, about 10 times, but some people were getting that on every run
Beers, BBQ and an early night with a book...
Then the rain stopped.... then the wind came.... The gazebo was in danger of being never seen again... then the rain came, 2am, 3am, 4am, more rain, more wind.... 6.30 i got up and it wasn't too bad.
Sunday started with grey clouds and yeah, more drizzly rain
IMG_20230723_081715 by
Steve Weeks, on Flickr
The boy finished fettling the bike and off he went for practice
IMG_20230722_082040 by
Steve Weeks, on Flickr
The rain hadn't made things better, but not worse either.
Bike was cleaned, again, again, again.
IMG_20230723_112814 by
Steve Weeks, on Flickr
Seeing was at 11.50am for him... He came down 32/61 which wasn't bad, he'd made some mistakes but he wasn't too unhappy, felt he had more to give in the race.
That was about where the good bits end... The race runs were coming down and it had now been dry for 3+ hours, the track day gone from a mud fest to people coming down with almost clean kits and bikes, the tyres still had a tread.
Eventually i saw him come into sight and glance at the clock, 4mins 10, already 10s down on his seeding run, he finished with a 4mins 18s, for 50/55 finishers and being his usual weird self he was pretty up-beat about it.
"i learned some new lines" and "i caught this berm after the left right and it was epic". He knew after his first decent crash on the run his time was done, so mostly just got down trying different things at times. But somehow came away really happy.
I'm disappointed for him, but in honesty he's pretty cool about it all
Which bring us into "why did you stop at a bike shop?"
The answer to that is. To try a couple of DH bikes they had in stock. The Specialized Demo delivery date had slipped again, i was having doubts the thing would ever arrive so wanted to look into options for him.
We tried out a Scott Gambler but in his car-park and grassy paddock tests it felt a little unbalanced to him. With the front end feeling all of out kilter with the rear balance.
So we tried a Trek Session in an R2 (Large), it was awesome... well, he thought so, i thought the bars were too wide.. But we both had a play on it, a bit of ride and tried it out.
IMG-20230721-WA0001 by
Steve Weeks, on Flickr
And yep as you guessed, we now own the Session. Just waiting for it to get delivered or collect next week.
I had a lot of chats with our mate at RSR Bikeworks who reassured me in terms of how the Trek 'feels' in comparison to the GT due to linkages and progression curves and he thinks the boy will get on with it really quickly.
It's coming to us in 29er form but with various flip-chips it's also 27.5 mullet compatible... so we'll try both and see what the lad prefers in terms of wheel sizing. I think he'll settle on the mullet myself, but i've been wrong before. It also comes with nice bits like X01 gearing, Boxxer Ultimate forks, Code RSC brakes all of which are higher spec than the Demo would have been.
There's no rush for him to race it, he can spend as long as he wants getting used to it, but of course, if he's faster on it, then he can race it in a few weeks at the next DH in Glencoe.
https://www.blazingbikes.co.uk/index.ph ... white.html
Eventually we got home, for curry and relaxing, before tomorrow morning i kick him out of bed and get him to start cleaning his bikes
IMG_20230723_080608 by
Steve Weeks, on Flickr
IMG_20230709_125507 by Steve Weeks, on Flickr
