British Downhill Series Round 4, Moelfre Hall, Wales - 9th August 2010

This is the Moelfre low down coming at ya!

It's Wales, it rains a lot in Wales you know, oh yes, and when we got down there on the Friday, guess what? Yes, you guessed it, it was roasting hot sunshine.... aye quite, was it hell, it was bucketing down with rain, oh joy!

Moelfre's track was pretty much kept to normal, a few new jumps at the top and a section that took you over parts of the four cross track to keep it 'fresh', it was all damn fast even in the wet. Saturday's practice went well, managed to get all my lines down fairly quick. Had to change to cut spikes after a heavy down pour which kinda caught me out on one of the first off camber grassy corners - resulting in me sliding on my ass. Managed to score my mate's GoPro camera to film some runs, dead chuffed, although completely useless with technology I'll get some videos up shortly!

Photo courtesy of Ian Cross, http://www.britishdownhillseries.com/gallery/main.html

Race day arrived bringing much better weather with it and the 'dry' tyres were back on the bike. The track was loads quicker, complete blast. Thought I'd go up top a little earlier with my seeding run, just to chill out which turned into a big mistake as one of the Masters Category riders had hurt himself pretty badly and the ambulance 'copter (the third of the weekend so far!) was called in. There were probably a good 100 riders waiting at the top of the hill and after about an hour or so Peaty was brought up to tell us all that the seeding runs were cancelled!! Sooooooooooooo..... probably the most random thing happened with all 100-odd riders enjoying a mini mega-avalanche down the uplift road, absolutely fantastic fun!

An official decision was made to open up a line at the top of the course where people had been crashing on a huck, personally I found it a bit annoying as this just made a straight line and took a good feature from the course. My race run went well considering lack of practise in the drying conditions. Made a big mistake when coming up to the road crossing where I slipped and clipped a pedal, however managed to sort things out before hitting the compression which would have ended in disaster! Although my run was relatively clean, the minor mistakes I made all added up which certainly cost me time.

Next up is the SDA's Round 4 at Ae Forest, hoping for dry weather and some good video footage, watch this space.