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Pearce Cycles Midlands Summer Series: Round Two
Rhyd-Y-Felin, Wales.
James - 14th June 2007
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Bala is a track of legend, but has recently had a lot of trouble with the land owners, thanks to a small contingent of muppets riding the track even though the land is private. pri·vate - not open or accessible to the general public!
Anyway, thanks to the work of Pearce Cycles the track once again enjoyed another race weekend. The start line is way up the hill, riders get a pretty long fireroad to get the speed up as you're whipped up the bank and drop back into the fireroad without heading straight down the hill. A long rocky fireroad greets you and after a sharp left hand berm you're back on track and on a tight and narrow singletrack style ride before you hit the fireroad again.
Remember those scenes in Earthed with the Athertons railing nice big berms somewhere in Wales? Well you're fired straight into these, after a week of sun baking the open hill side there is dust everywhere and tyres are struggling to dig into the hardpack below. Once again you drop back into the fireroad and down a stretch till you cross again, we saw one rider pump the compression before the fireroad and roadgap the road altogether, smooth!
Think Tissot jump at the Fort on a small scale, this is what you hit next before barrelling down the fireroad and dropping into the woods, the combination of a drop of water and hard packed fireroad means the back wheel slides all over the place scrabbling for grip under braking. Drop into the forest for a complete change, tight, between the trees and sharp corners. Then into the bottom section, some massive wide-taped sections.. this is how it should be! Pick the line and go for it.
After the last fireroad crossing its a short push through the woods where the dust was the worst, at best a couple of inches thick, if you were unlucky it was getting toward 4 inches at the end of the day! And this is in Wales?!
Nail it round the long sweeping corners in the field and across the line to the screams of adoring fans. Or just Si Paton.
Racing was fast and with minimal problems on the uplift it all ran sweetly, no damage to bikes because Dave Pearce had the big trailers running with racks! Sam Dale owned the field again, putting a three second gap between himself and James Hughes in Elite. The Electric boys were also up in the quarry hucking the huge Atherton road gap.
All the results can be found on Pearce Cycles and as usual we were up there shooting race photos, over 360 of them are available right here on FTMB, so if you were racing i'm pretty certain you'll have a picture.
Many thanks to the usual suspects, but again Pearce Cycles have shown they are the benchmark by which other race organisers should be marked, producing an excellent race weekend out of the bag again and again.
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