What a fantastic day.
After a week of watching the weather forecast predicting doom and gloom it was great to wake up and see a clear blue sky on Sunday morning.
Dom + brother Dan and I had all stayed at Fil & Kelly's, having been well fed by the Fordie Special Chips Delivery Service. I felt sorry for the BHC guys in the morning when everything was covered in a good layer of frost... I know Fordie can be a hard master when it comes to early starts so there must've been some cold riders when they got to Grafham!
It was still bloody cold when we got to Silverstone, but the lack of clouds and the heat from the sun said it was going to be a blinder. My DD bike had been making some pretty severe clanking noises on tickover so I was planning to run it gently for a session and then take a view on how it sounded....
Sundays at Silverstone now mean all three groups do their sighting laps at 09:00 in quick successsion to keep the noise down before 09:30, and there's a 'church break' with no bikes on track between 10:50 and 11:10, so we were chomping at the bit by the time a decent session came on. Dom's 748 had suffered an early gearbox problem so he'd shifted a group and would share fil's & my bike for the rest of the day. Fil & I had each done one session of 'running-in' (is 7000rpm still counted as running on a bike that peaks at 7500???) and the track had warmed up nicely for the second full session. We'd already decided that it was about time we got into race mode, so the rule book went out the window (along with any mechanical sympathy) and it was
Game On!!! The next 16-odd laps were flat-out, ten-tenths, slip-streaming, tail-wagging, leg-aching brilliance.
We swopped position several times, but never strayed more than a couple of bike lengths and, as Dan said when we came back in, "you could've thown a blanket over the pair of you". If this is the way DD is going to be then get ready for some seriously close racing!
Driving home afterwards I felt completely calm, physically exhausted, but really happy with the way the day had gone. We'd stopped a session early in order to stop fatigue driving us towards the kitty litter (something I've been meaning to do on previous TDs), and the bikes had shown that despite the lack of top-end they were capable of reeling in much quicker bikes, even on a fast sweeper like Copse. All we need now is another 20bhp...
Cheers,
Ali