125 Endurance Racing
OMCC OMCCas a club are involved with road riding, track riding, wheelie school, flat track, off road riding including green lanes and closed and also 125cc endurance racing in the FreeTech rounds.
These endurance races range from 3hr, 6hr, 12hr through to 24hr and they are great fun.
Our club team “OMCC Riff Raff” uses a Honda 125R which can only be ridden at speed by keeping it right up near the red line at all times.
So far I’ve ridden it at Knockhill in Scotland in 2021 and Pembrey, Wales at the begging of April 2022 with a team of four for a 6hr race. I was asked to qualify it and also managed to get the fastest lap in our team. Not bad for a 68 year old. 😂😂
I was asked to join the Little Chopper team for the 24 hour race at Teeside on the 2nd/3rd July 2022 with practice on the Friday before.
Little Chopper is a private team made up from four members of OMCC and the bike a Yamaha 125 is in the street stock class which is the lowest of the three categories. For the 245hr I and one other member was asked to make up the team to six members each doing half hour stints with a total of four hours each.
Annoyingly during my one but last stint I was taken out and then run over by a bike I’d just overtaken which had two consequences. 1. It broke the right hand foot peg and brake pedal off and 2. I cracked a rib at the bottom of my rib cage. Still this didn’t stop the fun as I picked the bike up, rode it back to the pits and we were soon on our way again without loosing a place. 🤪 The rib didn’t stop me doing my last stint and we finished 9th in class with 16 behind us and 24th overall out of 58 finishers.
The OMCC Club 125 Endurance Race Bike had been taken out twice and the body work was getting damaged quite badly along with the nose cone support so I put a cheap front end on it along with tiding up the wiring. The last off was at Teeside 3/9/22 when Vlad had his front wheel taken out and of course the previous one was me at the same track.
To keep the bike running well I had replaced the rear shock with an adjustable YSS along with servicing the front forks. While doing this I serviced the top end of the engine with decoke and valves reground with made it run a little crisper.
I wont be doing anymore races this year but there are two more rounds that the bike will be used at. My track riding won’t have ended though as we’re off to the Andulucia in October for three days and I’d just done two days at Snetterton instructing with OMCC the two days before the last race so pretty full on.
The end of the track season is nearly at an end so off road and road riding beckons.
As a point of interest the race number 718 is very significant to RAF Odiham as it refers to Chinook ZA718 which was one of the 30 original aircraft ordered in 1978.
ZA718 was in service for 39 years up until 2018 with a very distinguished service and you can see the details in Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_November .
Racing career over!
Well that’s the racing career over and done with. In two races up in Teeside I got taken out twom different occasions by very poor riding. The first one resulted in a cracked rib and the second 8/7/23 was a collar bone into three pieces when ‘T’ boned. Seems like I’m riding around with a target on my back. Very thankful that my leg wasn’t hit as that would have been a whole different story. What was extra annoying though is that this was the second lap of a four hour race!
I’m over it just continuing with track days. 😉