We finished with a "gentle trail ride" around the rest of the rally loop back to the 'Rally Shed', and while the others (staying locally) were making plans for a pub dinner, I bolted down a cup of tea to warm me up for the ride back to the coast. By now the rain was driving down, and it had gone far beyond the 'water resistance' of my Klim Dakar trousers. A few miles into the journey I stopped under some trees to put my earplugs in to quieten down the wind, pulled my Buff up over my face to stop the rain stinging, and turned the heated grips on full.
Sunday dawned, considerably more pleasantly than Saturday, but it was still quite cold as I gritted my teeth and pulled on my sopping wet riding gear for the ride over to the rally complex. We stayed in the groups we were in the previous day, and swapped instructors - meaning my group was with Burt and Moly for some high speed work.
Our first 'exercise' was a section where the track dropped downhill while curving continuously to the left, tightening slightly for the corner itself, then began to climb back up the hill. As Moly talked us through the ideal line I couldn't help noting that both the turn-in point and the apex were only a couple of feet from places where the edges of the track had collapsed, hitting the apex required hooking both wheels into a rut a mere foot from the edge of the track and a deep ditch, and running wide on the exit would see you disappearing over the edge and down into a valley. In other words, pretty fearsome when you contemplated approaching it at high speed.
Moly in full drift mode.
The location of this corner was such that we were able to ride a short, quarter mile loop and keep trying it again and again without having to turn around, so with Burt and Moly watching from the verge, we all set off to give it a try. We'd been told to "start at about 50% and work up", and my first few runs were quite tentative, concentrating on putting the bike in the right place on the track without going too fast, and convincing myself to look up the road to where I wanted to be, rather than target fixating on the (many) opportunities for having a horrible crash.
Pretty soon it all clicked, and I found myself able to attack the corner faster and faster - and in fact the whole loop, in an attempt to apply what I had learnt elsewhere, to get back round and have another go, and frankly because I was getting hooked on the feeling of going fast. One of my last attempts saw me winding the throttle to the stop before the apex, drifting across the exit, and just kissing the 6" berm on the outside with the back wheel to stop me going over the edge before powering up the hill and (surprisingly) thinking I could do with a few more than 46bhp. Success.
We worked on a couple more tricky corners, including one which was a bit tighter, wet and very rutted, allowing several lines, including running straight across the corner then bouncing off the gravel bank on the outside before accelerating away. Moly:
"My preferred line here would be the rut on the inside, but you've got to be able to take every corner at least a couple of different ways to allow you to get past people.". Finally we moved on to handling high-speed jumps - the aim in a long distance rally context being to make them as unexciting as possible.
We put everything together with a couple of laps of a larger loop before returning to base to join the other group for lunch. After all the high speed, lairy sliding antics of the morning, I managed to crash in the one 500m technical section as I failed to mentally 'change gear' to deal with the slower pace and trickier going. Later on I mentioned this to Burt, who replied (I paraphrase)
"You make up time by being quick on the open bits, you lose it by falling off in the technical sections" . So, erm, don't.
The afternoon was spent lapping both loops of the rally course behind Moly, steadily increasing the pace. We were travelling much faster than I ever would have considered riding before this weekend, but the most surprising thing was that I still felt like I was riding within my comfort zone - I was able to consciously think about whether or not I was applying the instructors' advice, and feeling like I would be able to go a bit faster if I was up against the clock on a rally special stage. A huge difference over the course of two days, and testament to the value of Craig, Tamsin, Burt and Moly's collective experience and their ability to pass some of it on to their students (They're planning on running more training weekends in the future, see
here for details). I didn't want to stop lapping the course at the end of the day, but it was finally time to head off and meet Sarah and the truck for the drive back to Derby.
On Monday night, before I had washed the T�n�r�, or my stinking riding gear, I signed up to the
Hafren Rally at the start of October. There's a time when you've got to stop saying "some day".
[Note: Although I had my camera with me, I was somewhat remiss with actually using it over the weekend - too busy having fun and attempting to extract the maximum amount of knowledge from the instructors! With the exception of the first photo of the T�n�r� at the entrance to the rally complex, all the photos and videos used were taken by Jason Markos. Jason was in the other group on his BMW HP2, which is why, aside from the first few shots before we split up, the weather in the photos doesn't match my comments in the text. His story of the weekend can be found here]