Caersws Cup Rd1 6-7th March;

I cruised up with Expert riders Oliver Burton and Lee Huskinson and got there at a pretty devastating time in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Saturdays practise started at 10:30 which was pretty ideal as it was a cold and frosty night and the track would have been sketchy if it was any earlier.

The course was pretty simple but still had a lot of line choice in my eyes. And with it being simpler than the usual course it’s more of a challenge to find the lines to go faster.

Saturday was really good fun, I smashed out lots of runs and got some good riding in. There was a new table top nearing the bottom of the middle section that was the strangest jump I think I have done. It was not massive but probably about 25 foot long and slightly hipped to the right. The funny thing was the take off was “dirt jump” steep and the landing was even steeper than that! Be it very strange it was very satisfying getting it right because the g-force on the landing even when getting it perfect was mad. I bottomed out my forks a couple of times from it and I could feel my tires rolling over a bit.

I think I must have done about 12 runs practise and by the end of the day I was happy with all my lines.

Saturday night’s sleep was disgustingly cold! The condensation on the inside of the van from us breathing was instantly frozen! I was inside 2 sleeping bags and I still couldn’t sleep.

Sunday morning appeared to make sense why this was. Practise started at 8:30 and the whole course was solid ice from top to bottom. I tried to do a run down but it was impossible to do it. Elite rider Sion Whitecross was air ambulance to hospital with hand and leg injuries and everyone despite not being able to go faster than walking pace was breaking brake levers etc from dropping their bikes on the solid ground. The decision was made to open practise until 1 o’clock with the result of only having one race run. I went down and waited for a couple hours like most others to wait for the sun to burn the frost away.

A section of the course was taken out and a fire road was put in place which I thought was the wrong decision to make as other sections of the course were worse and the whole course was perfect and dusty again by race runs.

I did about 3 runs practise and got ready for the one race run ahead. I was feeling good on the course and I did a timed practise run which came to 2mins 29secs. This was however on a pretty icy course.

My race run took forever to come. I had to wait for every racer bar one to do their run before I was due to go down. I had a pretty good run with a few slip ups as any race run. I found it quite hard to know how fast the course was running as it had been 3-4 hours since I went down in an icy practise. It was very grippy in most sections now and I didn’t feel like I took advantage of this very well but the situation was the same for all the expert and elite racers. I also ran someone’s foot over in my run. I was taking a mega outside line around one of the last wooded corners to straighten an off-camber section up. I was going as wide as the tape would let me in practise. It just happened that 2 guys were standing pushing the tape in to get closer to the track when I kept my line and my back wheel ran over one of the guy’s feet. It made no difference to me but I am sure that guy won’t be standing too close next time. I took 2nd place behind Kerr. I was happy to have a strong result again in Elite and get 2nd fastest time of the day with a lot of respectable names around.

Here’s a link to the results; http://www.caerswscup.co.uk/

Thanks to Last, Rezurgence, Lifestyle Ford, 2026 distribution, DMR, Funn, 661, Maxxis, KMC, Mojo suspension, and Shimano.