October 4thI woke up to discover that I must have bruised my left foot in the crash too, as walking was painfull. But after a quick spinon the turbo, found that I could pedal fine, so no problem - I just spent a lot of the time hopping round the place! There were drag races today, as an aside from the main racing on Rt 305. We thought they were at 8:30, so went down to the airport early to find no one else there. After getting various conflicting reports, we eventually got a definite midday start time. The rest of the morning was spent giving interviews - for the Canadian Discovery channel guys, and to Chet Kyle (who started all this malarky...), and having people generally giving the world's fastest fruit a poke. 
Then we headed down to the airport for the drag races.Not a huge turnout, but drags are always fun. It was a 500ft course, with two riders picked at random each time and the winner going through. It worked out well with the final ending up with my on Bike Friday against Fast Freddy in the Gold Rush Colorado. Freddy was certainly fast; he went on the 'steady' of ready, steady go! But I managed to get a wheel in front and held him off to the end by a length. 
As soon as we were done, it was quickly off to the display ground for a rodeo demonstration. This was pretty cool, with an amazingly plucky eleven year old bull riding, and plenty of roping cows and all that cowboy stuff. Miles was very pleased with taking this picture:- Then after a late lunch, we headed out to the course to watch. We parked at the catch and had started walking (or in my case hobbling) up to the traps, when the spectator bus took pity on us and picked us up, dropping us at the finish line. We cheekily watched from here, which was great as we got the speeds straight away from the timing tapes. I borrowed some binoculars, and so could watch the bikes coming down the road from four miles away when they popped onto the horizon. I've only ever seen these speeds from the inside of the windscreen, so it was pretty impressive to see the bikes come past. Generally it was a slower night, with a slight headwind (still legal though) and being a bit 'heavy', so most people were going 2-4mph slower than last night, except Sam who repeated his 79mph run - which is something else to see! Andrea safely backed up her world record by going 62, and both camera bikes made their first successful runs. Sean had lots of starting problems, but turned out a 60mph run, and Matt Weaver hit 73mph, despite scaring us stupid by getting within a few inches of the side of the road through the traps. If conditions are good for the last night tomorrow, Sam looks good for a new record, and Andrea could push hers up too. I've got more pictures, I'll get them up when I have more time later on. |
