FrockFest Beta
M'kay, I got there a little later than expected... I had hired a van for the event, and kinda got distracted by how much space it offered, so packed up most of my tools, and a fair quantity of parts, crates, carpet scraps for flooring, a chair, 12 * 5ah 6s, 2*5ah 8s, and 4 * 8ah 5s, A bunch of LiPoFe4, including some thunderskies for a charging station, a couple of chargers, invertors, complete electrical repair kit, zip ties, tubes, tires, the "shop Bike" (basically a solid build with a 10 amp controller, you choose the voltage...) A Kit bike built for carrying shite, a 3/4 complete lightweight dually for mid power, and a bike trailer. Oh and three helmets, two sets of body armour, water and first aid kit...
Got it all rolling and arrived at the gravel carpark on Racecourse road nigh on 10 am... kinda knew my original plan of 7am was a bit.... mmm... hopeful
Full-throttle and Alan-c and alan's son sean were already there, Alan with his trike, trailer, generator and stuff, Full-throttle with his standard tools bike water and food.
I brought about a third of the stuff in, three trips with the shite carrrying bike + trailer, n rigged up a 14s 10ah battery to run on the shop bike, calculating at max charge this would give me around 58v, within the limit of the 62v caps of my no name brand kit controllers... and around max power 600w
(The shop bike is basically a quality alloy hard-tail, with reasonable Disc RockShox on the front, and modified vintage road bike side pull brakes on the rear (no v-brake mounts and motor not set up for disc) Strangeley enough I get better braking power off the modded sidepulls than I get from shitty discs on other builds...)
Alan and full-throttle did a few laps, The trike is something else, not really "needing" the same level of traction, and Alan balls to the wind throwing it around corners... the track did mete out some punishment to the trike over the day, (namely derailleur disintegrated, Flat on the driven rear, and the two front tyres, new for the day were down to "canvas" by the end
)
T3sla rocked up without a bike and looking pretty sad, and then Bout this time Sam arrived first with the Aprilia, (later to bring the Aldi bike, a nice inspirational build) and a few laps more were had by all, and then around midday I guess, with Sam needing to leave soon, we mashed together a race format of sorts and did the do...
No-Need-For traction and power had Alan C running front from the start, Full-throttle's skillz had him not totally outclassed by Alan, and good to see... Sam had me by about half a lap slowly increasing over the race length...
the race format was a little haphazard to say the least, and so after performing the mandatory pedal only lap on cue, and being passed twice by the front runners still under full power while I did it, I withdrew from the race in Fourth place....
Track assessment... It's bloody grouse!
Yup bumpy as, still plenty of scope for cleaning out excess shrubbery, but the crew did a good job last weekend... there is one straight (the main straight) and one corner (the corner after the straight) where a racing line on un broken surface where it counts can be had, all other corners, either ball bearing gravel or sand, and shit loads of bumps in the middle twisty bit.
600w in the configuration I had was pretty pointless... with a head wind directly against on on the main straight, I got a max speed of 27kp/h, which is pretty piss poor when you compare it with my runs on an uncleaned track on Shorza's bike, where I was reaching 50km/h by the end of the straight. Was good testing though as I wanted to see how 14s would go through my controllers, worked okay on 10 amp, and would be happy to try it out on 20... but truth be known, I reckon a 1-2kw machine with a top speed of around 50 and good torque would have shaken some tailfeathers... I real low end torque monster, ridden like a dirt bike would have given Alan a run for it's money, (In slight disagreement here with Sam, as weight and light and nimble can be matched by grunt and track ripping power slides out of corners anyday
)
Pit Assessment
(as you prolly figured by now, I pretty much was planning on running the pits, ready to keep racers on the track)
A few giggles from the lads about how much stuff I'd brought, but... meh... With a few more racers on builds of various finesse, who knows what could have fallen off on the track
With so few bikes turning up, I pretty much had all the minor shite covered, one derailleur and one uber awesome tube, (chain repair for The Beastie was "off-track" so doesn't count).
Didn't even set up a charging station so was superflouous for the day, but with more participants.... hmmm
Merlin n The Beastie got delayed by Logistics (Ferry issues) and I reckon if they hada made it in time for a race they would have livened things up, both on mid-powered machines and with rev-head mentalities (I gather they raced each other on the track for a few laps on there way to meet up with the rest of the crew post race lunch)
FrockFest Beta, cos it wasn't really an organised race....
wont take much to get a format down on paper and the equipment to marshal/ call it well (EG a clipboard some paper, a pen and a stopwatch, plus someone who wants to do it) and a bit of pre-planning n stuff will no doubt ramp now that the cherry has been popped.
Joe
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) wore out a set of brand new tyres(down to the canvas 
