Festival of power report

We arrived on Thursday afternoon to find the bike pits were already overflowing and after a real struggle setting up in the space available we finally signed on and got the bike scrutineered.
The Easter event is always busy and has a huge entry list, so we already knew that the 3 scheduled runs per day was not going to happen. On Friday we managed just one run, but the bike ran great and it was a huge relief to find the new gearbox - and my own modified shift drum for it, worked perfectly. I had to feather the throttle slightly at the top end due to the bike heading slightly left, but it still ran a really nice 7.6 and very nearly a personal best. The time slip did show however that it ran best ever half track time and speeds, so i knew it would go a bit faster so long as i kept it nailed.

On Saturday we were one of the first classes out and the track seemed to have improved from the day before. This time the bike went pretty straight, and i kept the throttle wide open for the whole run. The result was a new personal best ET of 7.585 @167.31mph!
For a while that was good enough for number 1 qualifier too. Only - in the next round Allan Davies ran 4 thousandths of a second quicker to take back the top spot.
In a way though it was the half track times that had seen the biggest improvements, somehow it had gained 4-5mph at half track and was now dipping into the 4.7 second zone. Strangely this didn't seem to improve the mph at the finish.... or at least not on that run.
In the next and final qualifying round i wasn't able to match that time and once again had to get off the throttle near the top end, the result being a 7.7 @ 161mph.
Race day was a huge disappointment for everyone, but at least comp bike were one of just a few classes that made it through the first round of eliminations before it started to rain.We were up against Comp bike newcomer Robert Field but he must've had some issue as he wasn't in the pairing lanes, so we took a bye and ran another 7.6, this time with a new PB speed of 169.31mph.

Only 6 bikes made runs in comp bike despite there being 8 entries. I'm not sure what happened to Steve Whiting, but comp regular Harold Wolfenden has now permanently defected to Funny bike after buying the ex Al Young turbo busa machine.