Poor weather puts Cherry Valley riders in trouble

Alford Wheelers 10 - 05/07/2005 - Course C10/8

Pooring rain and windy conditions led to Ian relinquishing his grip on the Alford 10 which he has won for several years but Sam Tuplin gave a sterling performance despite a niggling injury to take 5th spot. With heavy rain now set in at Lincoln, Andy Moore was a non starter not wanting to travel an hour to the race to find he may not be able to ride. Meanwhile, Andy Lintin had set off to travel to the event and came to grief in his car as it aquaplaned across standing water and hit a grass bank causing the vehicle to be damaged badly only 7 miles from the race.

As the rain poored from the sky onto this mid week event, Ian sat in his car until the last minute to set off to the start. With his turbos out of use, Ian didn't bother with a warm up and selected a pair of high pressure training wheels for the race as there was quite a lot of debris on the road. With just a brief 5 minute ride down to the start as a warm up on wet roads, the rain eased and Ian started as favourate to win despite having a huge disadvantage.

Meanwhile, Sam had already started on his new C4 time trial machine which was the first time he had ridden the bike properly. Taking it steady around the greasy wet corners and particularly slowly at the dead turn at Sutton on Sea, Sam was flying despite not being use to the machine and how it handles and on such a particularly bad night. With Sams knee and hamstring injury still niggling him, which forced Sam to retire from the Gerry Thurlow Road Race on Sunday, he was clearly enjoying the new experience of his new bike which was clearly motivating Sam to ride harder than he had all year and would see him cross the finish line on the edge of Alford in a time of 23.22 giving Sam 5th place overall.

As Sam was finishing, a reluctant Ian set off from the start for his ride in the Alford 10. Again, like most competitors in the race, Ian was picking his line very carefully around the many corners on the course. At times Ian could feel both wheels sliding across the road before he would adjust his body weight to bring the bike back under control and into a straight line again. With the lack of pre-race warm up and preparation clearly effecting Ian he crossed the finish line with a time of 22.03 which would only be good enough for 2nd place behind John Greed (VC Lincoln) who won the event in 22.01.

'I didn't want to get out of the car and ride up to the start' was Ians comments after the race, I don't have any turbo trainers at the moment to warm up on so I didn't really want to go out into the pooring rain and try and warm up on the wet roads. I also decided not to ride good wheels tonight including my disc as I there was high chance of puncturing'.

While Ian was philosophical about coming 2nd, Sam was delighted with his ride considering this was the first time he had ever ridden his new time trial bike in a race.