20th April 2001 - Snetterton

Another day at the mercy of the Norfolk weather. Had to get up at the unearthly hour of five thirty in order to get there on time but I did manage it and even got my gear in the garage before it started to rain. Set about putting the wet tyres on and meeting up with Morph from Team Mojo, and fellow Team Ixion rider, who I was sharing a garage with. It might be a bit expensive to have to hire a garage for practice days but it proved well worth it to be out of the wind and rain for the day.

I missed the first session as I was busy changing to wet tyres but the rain continued to hammer down. Before the long the circuit was closed whilst they dealt with some flooding in a few of the more interesting parts of the track. It reopened again but we then had another wait before our group could go out after some of the hoarding came loose from the bridge due to the high winds.

I now have a lot more movement in my shoulder and my physiotherapist just agreed to let me go back to the gym. I couldn't believe how weak my shoulder and upper back have become. I had trouble just lifting the two kilogram weights - No wonder I have been having problems riding. Whenever I try to hang off the bike my upper body can't support itself and I feel like I'm falling off. This usually results in hanging on to the bars quite tightly which makes the bike behave erratically and makes me even more nervous.

The rest of the morning sessions were rather short as they tried to get the program back on track by running ten minute sessions. I forgot to put the lap timer on the first time out but it was probably just as well as I pottered round trying to get used to the track again. The second session wasn't much better and I was still only putting in around 1:50s laps. The wind was so strong down the 'Revett' straight that you had to lean in to the wind in order to stay on course.

It started to dry out for the afternoon so I went out on wets on a drying track and finally managed to get my times down to 1:41.46s. Mmmm, not even in the same league as the last time I was here. As the track was drying out quite quickly I swapped the wheels again so that I'd by ready for the next session. As is usual it then proceeded to rain quite heavily again. I decided to call it a day after managing a grand total of twelve timed laps on a mainly wet circuit. I really wasn't up to changing the wheels over yet again on my own.

It was at this point that Nick Straughan, another Team Ixion rider, decided to go out in the rain on his brand new wet tyres. Nick's approach seems to be to go out as hard as possible in the first race, crash and then go out slightly slower for the second one. Pretty soon the session ended and we all wondered where he had got to - This question was answered when Nick arrived with his bike on the back of the truck looking very worse for wear.

If anyone thought my bike looked a mess after my Lydden incident, Nick's bike looked like a pile of scrap. Being one of the luckiest people I've ever met it was only fairing, levers, foot pegs and other associated incidental damage but they still had an awful lot of work to do to make it out in the races tomorrow.