Harry Molloy: Scarborough Downtown Fat Face Night Race;

-Sponsored by Fat Face, Jagermeister and Monster Energy.

It was a late one coming all the way up on Friday night that’s for sure. When we got to the venue and got out it was absolutely freezing. I guess I should have expected the worst parking about 30 feet away from the sea. Temperatures must have been cold without the wind as I was on the edge of being cold even in my double sleeping bag arrangement. Haha.

I woke up to that horrible sound of rain hitting the top of the van. Soon, with bacon burger in hand, I walked up the course. I thought it looked pretty awesome. First of all you come flying down through castle walls for about 200 yards on coble path. Then it’s hard on the brakes to turn a sharp left down about 8 flights of steps turning right.

A gradual left takes you over a tall tabletop made from scaffolding through a chicane to slow the speed and over a take off to land on the platform of a 40 foot long lorry.

Off the lorry and it’s a very fast section with a chance to get into your hardest gear. Next is up hill up a gravel path with wooden slates in it. You had plenty of speed from the section before to get up the hill so it was fine.

It began to go downhill again and the idea of the next bit was to go up on the grass verge, around a bin and cut into the next sharp right hand corner.

A short gravel path brought you to a sharp left which was a real hard one because the very inside of the corner had a slopping drop to it.

A short pedal brought you to about another 8 sets of steps, right onto another scaffolding structure that drops you onto the road at a round-a-bout.

A short sprint leads you to the finish line.

We were scheduled to have 4 practise runs, a qualifying run and a race run. However with delays at the beginning of practise we were limited to 3 practise runs. I decided I had to go fast from the start if I was going to be able to put in a good time. I kept to most of my lines I saw from walking the course and after practise felt pretty confident.

Seeding runs were at a time where the light had begun to change and the lights came on. I was the last person down in my category I think. I came down and had a good run; obviously not all out but a good comfortable run. I came through the finish and the commentator said I had won with a 2 second lead with a time of 1 min 17 seconds.

It got darker and the tension was building up. The atmosphere at the bottom was really good with loads of spectators.

Race runs began but it wasn’t long before delays took over the event. The weather was awfully windy and the rain just kept on coming which meant some of the lights couldn’t be put up so some sections were very dark. After the medics had brought out the spine board a few times decisions had to be made about what was going to happen. We were waiting at the top for a long time and it eventually come down to the rest of the race runs being cancelled. All the juniors would take our seeding run times. I didn’t really want to win it like that at all but I’ll take it.