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The 13th and 14th rounds of the championship were held at Cadwell park and as the weekend approached I was beginning to wonder if it would be worth going due to the amount of rain we had had. Last year we did a Cadwell early in the season and the whole place was 6 inches deep in mud following heavy rain. Fortunately I was wrong and the weekend was, weather wise, just about perfect. The meeting attracted an initial entry of 30 but we ended up with 25 due to a spate of cancellations for various reasons. We were one of the first to arrive on the Friday and with the bikes scrutineered and the signing on done there wasn't much to do except wait for everyone to arrive. All but one made it without problems. The one being Michael Hand. Michael would appear to be trying to outdo Rob Eley in the disaster stakes, as a puncture on his trailer and lack of a spare meant the last three miles were done on the wheel rim. He was in either the AA or RAC but couldn't get a signal and telephone boxes are a bit far and few between in the lanes around Cadwell. Chris Spooner arrived with an X7 that just refused to run even though he had sorted, or so he thought, the ignition problems it had suffered. Fortunately the problem was solved on the Friday night. Someone out with us for the first time was Gavin Littlewood on what was Martin Pitts X7. Gavin had a bit of a coming together with another machine in the first Phoenix event and as a result didn't get out in the first Earlystocks event. This didn't seem to put him off too much as he looked to be going well in the later events. With there being four races, I'm not going to run through the results as it gets a bit repetitive. In the 1300 modified class, Nigel Lawrence took four outright wins and is now 30 points clear of Clive Wadey who had to pull out of the meeting. In the 750 class Tony Smith took 4 class wins to extend his lead over Mel Coote, who it must be said has done mainly only the Phoenix rounds, to over 84 points. With only 60 points left available this gives Tony the 750 championship. In the 550 class Karl Scott as expected took 4 class wins beating most other machines as well. This puts him 58 points ahead of Cass but due to the points from two rounds Cass has to drop, it gives him the 550 championship. In the 250 class, Richard Insall took 4 class wins to secure the 250 class championship. This is the first time since at least 1992 that an RD250 has won the championship. For those of you with long memories, I said an RD 250 not a Yamaha 250. In the 1300 production Steve Cave was never challenged and as we have come to expect, took four class wins. This didn't actually give him the championship as he had already won it several meetings ago. Now we come to a championship where it wasn't four wins and championship won. Pete Jarnell took two wins on the Saturday but had to settle for two seconds on the Sunday when he was beaten by Michael Hand who had mechanical problems an Saturday. Michael took the drastic step of driving home to Birmingham on Saturday night to fetch a spare pair of barrels. Steve Bailey. |