Ducati Sporting Club UK > DesmoDue Race Series > DesmoDue - General Questions and Chat > Disco infurno!

[Matt-T28]

As race reports go, this will be my first so it may be utter rubbish .

The plan!
Enter a class B bike in class A and ride the living sheet out of it till it cant give any more or it simply combusts.................................hmm...... ............ so far then mission accomplished!

The rest of the plan consisted of running the newly built 748 in SOT to see what it was like, this plan fell somewhat short of completion but it will be back lol!

And so..

The friday trackday was to get upto some sort of speed on the 748 and just try a couple of things with the DD bike, had some issues with set up on the 748 and then had the front brake sieze on completely on the dd bike at the bottom of the mountain ammounting to a grand total of 1.5 laps on DD bike on testday so really thought we would be up against it come sat morning.

Sat morning came around and with DD qually directly after SOT we would have to make a quick change in the holding area after SOT qually but as it turned out i ended up jogging back from the chicane to the holding area as the 748 decided that it couldn't possibly go any further and starting chucking its oil out of the pram to make sure. Jumped on the DD bike about ready to collapse and headed out to try and put a half decent time in on it, as bad as it is to say but i was thanking my lucky stars when the red flag was shown as i badly needed a rest, luckily the fella wasn't hurt and we soon went back out again. Qualified 5th on the new lay out grid so i was middle of the second row and fairly pleased with it really.

Fast forward to the grid for race one and this madman with a sky blue bike tried his best to send it back to the sky it came from when the lights went out, i backed off for a split second but then figured they would red flag it if it was too bad so just went, trouble was that this pesky dude with PEANUT?!?!? written across the back of his leathers had made the decision sooner than me and decided to make me guess why he had that on his leathers for a while. I got passed and got my head down and didn't see anyone else till the last lap when Sam West made the decision to take a closer look at the grass through hall bends, not sure mate but i think it might be a bit different to the grass they have at uni these days . Crossed the line in third having been passed by a lairy out of control dude on a CB500 but turned out to be second overall as he wasn't meant to be out with us anyway so second overall and a 1:50.49 second lap to boot so was pretty chuffed really.

It had been raining on and off for quite a while before race 2 and i had been secretly quite confident about it if it was wet having now found this new love for riding in the wet on these tyres, So I was quite pleased that it was still raining for the start.
Otei had opted to sit it out because of the rain which makes sense when your chasing the title, so Chris offered to do a pit board for me instead, but i had nothing to loose so was well up for it. Sam and Andy were sat on the front row ahead of me and when the lights went out i got a tow behind them to the first corner and slotted in nicely behind them, i followed for a while trying to work out where the grip was and where i was quicker and found an opening down into the hairpin to get past Sam, mostly due to him being overly carefull after his fall but i got past and started looking for a way past Andy which i found down the inside braking down into Mansfield corner but then realised very quickly as i was trying to make a break that it had stopped raining and was drying out really very quickly! I tried to get away but in the end Andy came past down the start finish straight and Sam came past on the back straight and I settled for third.

All in all a good day with 2 class A pots on a class B bike.
Gribfest was an absolute sell out success and a brilliant way to finish the day.

Sunday was a little bit different........................
Qually went well and we managed to stick the bike on the front row which i was mega chuffed with.

Race one however.................
Didn't get a great start but a few laps in and i got back upto third, then i was going round chris curve and smelt a bit of burning, so there i was thinking "blimey! someone must be ragging the **** out of one of these today?" .......................
Then right on que, braking into Mansfield some thick black smoke came from the inside of the fairing of my bike! Stuck my leg out straight away and stopped to find that no amount of turning off the key or kill switch would stop the engine, so i clunked it into
gear to cut the engine but it did nothing to stop the smoke from pouring out the bike.
I waved franticaly to the marshalls to come and put it out before i ended up with baked spuds but that didn't work either, we had to disconnect the live battery terminal to get it to stop in the end. The race had been red flagged because of the smouldering bike so we got recovered back to the paddock straight away where we set about trying to sort it for race two. We found out shortly after that the race had been abandoned due to numerous red flags and there would be a re-run at the end of the day so if we could get the bike working again we wouldn't loose a result.
We were very kindly leant a reg/rec by Sam West's dad and a group of very interlectual looking fella's headed by our very own Douglas set about getting the bike working again. It turned out that the fire had caused a lot of problems to the wiring loom but they fought on and Douglas was still working on getting the bike going in the holding area while the rest were on their warm up lap to get it going and he succeeded! When most would have given up, he battled on and got the bike going juat in time for me to line up at the back of the grid with no warm up lap.
I gazed through the binoculars waiting for the lights to go out (yes! it really does feel like that far away!) and off we went. I got past as many as i could before the flag and it was good enough for 8th overall but i had managed a 1:49.79 lap, so was pretty pleased with that despite the 8th place finish.

The re-run of race one was held over 4 laps, i got to start from 3rd on the front row and had decided before the start that i was going for it at all costs.

The lights went out and i got a pretty good start and was sat behind Andy and Tim in third, they had decided to try and swop paint from the first corner and were holding each other up quite badly and at one point i very nearly had a go at the both of them on the brakes but thought better of it and they both cleared off after that so i just got my head down and went for it as much as i dared. Finished third overall and got the time down to 1:49.16 too so ultimately, it was a fantastic weekend for results as we got three class A podium finishes on a 583.

A huge huge thanks needs to go to Steve GD for all his efforts from the very start of the idea and another huge thanks goes to Graham Blakey for everything he has done too. Other thanks need to go to Douglas, the man who refuses to give up no matter what and I am so pleased he didn't! Thanks for everyone who helped me out at the weekend and leant us bits to fix the bike.

Another mention goes to Otei, 45's mate??? Thats seriously going some on a shopping bike! There are bound to be some i have missed too but a huge thanks to everyone.

Now, anybody got a spare wiring loom for a 583 and a complete generator for a 748 including side casing

[Otei]

Is this really your first race report?

Hmm, I guess it must be.

Figured you must have chased a black cat under a ladder into a mirror shop and smashed up the entire stock once inside by opening an umbrella, such was the ridiculous state of your luck at Cadwell.

Great results despite that though, silly laptimes, and even more impressive seeing as the nearest you've been to a riding anything on track this year is a pushbike.

5 Otei points out of 5.