Day 16: Battle Mountain NV

Most, if not all, the usual suspects are here as well as some less usual ones in what must be the most international edition of the event evvah.  As well as the homegrown talent and the renegades from north of the 49th parallel (about whom I mustn't be too rude as I want to visit their country on the way back to Chicago) we have entrants from Australia, Italy, France, BRITAIN (x2), the Netherlands (x3) and first-timers from both Mexico and Japan.  Admittedly the Mexican machine is a nicely finished fairing and a box of bits but their head man has been spotted down on his bended knee in front of Steve Nash, who is never happier than when he's got some advanced fettling to do.

Being Sunday we have to finish putting the course together, but in these days of huge university team good help, in the form of young and healthy Penniless Student Oaves, is not hard to find.  Big ups to the boys and girls from HPT Delft/Amsterdam for heaving straw bales and juggling bits of wood while we senior citizens shouted encouragement from the sidelines.

Above: Oaves, labouring
Below: Mikey Sova, supervising

And then we all went home for tea.  Or to upload photos, in my case, which is painfully slow.  Photos from the rest of the event will likely be downsized to 1024x768 before going to flickr as otherwise I will have no time for meals, sleep or taking any more pictures chiz.

Most people were over at the Civic Center getting their bikes inspected for hidden motors, dangerous pointy bits, Fabian Cancellara, etc. etc. but one that had already come back was Dave Sianez' new trike, Slimpossible:

Dave ran the beautifully-finished, very lizardly but somewhat wide Big Nose Pete here a few years ago; as the name suggests the new one is about half the width.  I finally gave up on anything happening back at the Super 8 and went over to scrutineering myself.  Not much happening there either until about ten minutes before George Leone & Jonathan Woolrich were about to close up shop.  Fortunately a few teams had left their machines lying around to be prodded.

Trike record holder All Overzealous, with new harder-to-see-at-dusk paintjob

PulsaR, the Italian Job, now has a camera,as well as a windscreen???

George Leone practices his breakdance moves behind Super Ketta Machine 162, the first Japanese entry

From Russia with wossname, the simple but effective Tetiva 4

Just time to go back and upload more pictures before the inaugural Everyone Meeting and celebration of Plymouth Uni team boss Adam Kyte's birthday.  Which went on for quite a while.  Eventually escaped with Jonathan and Mark Mueller to the Wol Club for a very very late breakfast or quite late dinner, depending on which way you look at it.

This morning we were prodding the Super 8 (Larry Lem's new camera bike, not the motel).  It's not light.  John Jackson has threatened to spend a week at Larry's place when he builds his next machine teaching him how to do vacuum bagging of composites and thus make it half the weight.  This evening he was limping.  Ha ha, I said, perhaps Larry ran over him while testing the new bike.  Almost.  It transpired that the bike had fallen over. Onto John's foot.  Oops.

Qualifying runs tomorrow,  Teams please to be ready at 07:00 and includes me as I have been volunteered to drive Team Cygnus' lorry again, at least for the morning.  While it is a Chevrolet Suburban instead of a Ford Explosion it is the same size as last year's lorry and much the same shape i.e. a brick with rounded edges.  Deep joy.  Also the waker is set for 05:30.  My wossname runneth over.

Edit: It runneth over in more ways than one, as that strange noise you, or rather I, heard just now turned out to be two cans of unintentionally frozen Coke exploding and spraying horrible brown slush all over the inside of the fridge.  Bum.