Welsh Series Round 1 2013 Margam Park

Race report: Margam Park - Welsh Rd 1 Matt Craner (Vet) 3rd Rob Jackson (Grand Vet) 5th Aaaaah the joy of welsh racing.... Or should I say bog running! So Rob and I decided to make the intrepid run up to Margam this weekend. I had returned from Italy and a busy conference having not ridden all week. Looking out on a grim Sunday morning in the dark to heavy rain made staying in the bed and sacking the race very enticing. However, the ever effusive Rob bounced through my door at 6am for the drive to Wales. Much of the chat on the drive up was on tyre selection (short chat as mud was going to be central to the day!!) and general racing malarkey! Pulling into the car park with horizontal rain and 6 degrees C things were looking grim. The joy of a 10 min walk to registration was not a great start. With race plates fixed to the bike we headed off for a warm up lap to bring us back round for race start. 10 min into the lap and Pssssssst....... I had a side wall split in my mud tyre. Plan b was to scoot quickly back to the van, change wheel to my dry semi-slick renegade tyre. Climbing the mud fest was not going to be an option. I managed to get back with 5 min before race start. The start had a fast fire-road section including a lengthy climb. We the switched back and had a grassy steep muddy climb. My rear wheel spun out due to shocking tire option in which renegade is usually such a great tyre but 6 inches of gloopy welsh mud was a bit of a challenge for it. I apologized to all behind as this meant everyone else had to jump off. Looking round this was Rob! Ooops. The next section pretty much involved a running piece through off-camber roots and deep mud, wet roots and rocks ie pretty much everything that makes single track unrideable!!! After this a steep rocky fast straight line decent to keep on you on your toes. Short kicker climb and then more running up a grassy boggy climb. Then you had a ski style descent of sliding your back end round whilst keeping your front end going in the right direction! After this guess what? Yup more running through a forested mud fest of 6inches of porridge .... Meh. The last section was about 600-800 yards of flat switch backing deep water grassy gloop for which I had very little, if any, traction. I had 5 laps of barely rideable cold wet racing and Rob 4 laps. Despite the conditions there were quite a few riders out there with about a 25 strong field in vets and 12 or so in the grand vets. In my race I was in 5th position after lap one with 3rd to 6th placed riders all pretty close. The running sections were frustrating and meant I tended to lose ground which I regained on what was rideable down hill. The flat grassy section was a killer for me and I always seemed to lose time compared to others but I hit the short steep fire road sections hard and gradually wore the nearby competition down. At lap 3 I dropped Nick Butler and moved to 4th. Soon after one of the leading riders had punctured so I moved to third. I couldn't quite catch the Certini second placed guy who had his running shoes on! But third overall was a good result in truly shocking conditions! Rob had a unique start with the marshals not being terribly clear about when to go but they rapidly moved up from the field and was right on my tail up the climb. Rob never happy with messing about running and breaking his rhythm found it hard going but kept digging in. On the first lap Rob got stuck behind a group that crashed on the steep rutted rocky section and lost touch with the leaders. He kept grinding away not losing or gaining ground and came in 5th place. Two welsh races in the early spring in my history. Both hard mud run fests!! Me thinks there is a trend here!!