Day 14: Battle Mountain NV

Firstly, you are actively encouraged to join this event's Farcebok group and call out the idiots who think verbally abusing our flagger for doing her job is acceptable behaviour.  WTF do they do when they encounter a red traffic light?  Shoot it?  Anyway, the Highway Patrol come out to ensure the local motons were on their best behaviour...

Sgt Aten has a new company car this year

This morning we ran the heats on the long course first, because wind.  Good for the teams, bad for the early-rising officials who found the breakfast area full of grubby students again.  Bah!

With LSBU still out of the game rebuilding the internals of Velocitractor, the honour of BRITAIN again fell to Liverpool.  Or would have done had ARION5's camera systems decided to behave themselves.  A vital piece of electrickery went "Phut" just as Ken was being pushed off the start line.  Then the backup camera decided to show a bleached-out and horribly over-exposed view of Nevada.  With only one video system working properly, they declined to run on safety grounds.  Someone suggested fitting the offending camera with sunglasses ha ha.

Liverpool were pessimistic about the medium-term weather forecast

I have discovered the Sprocket Rocket team's SEEKRIT stash of spare body panels...

The Sprocket Rocket threw a chain about a mile before the traps and coasted through at their by now customary 55-56 mph, but there were no further mishaps, embuggerances or Fairy Visitations.  Speeds were fair to middling, with Fabien again being the fastest with a wind-legal 80.05 mph.  The timing system decided to run out of electricity just as his team-mate Ilona was heading into the 200, though the bike's GPS indicated a high 74 or low 75 mph run, albeit without legal wind.  Rosa was again in the high 74s.

Down the road to run two qualifying heats.  This got bizarre after Annecy chef d'equipe Guillaume de France had set off.  "I've artificially inseminated more cows than you can possibly imagine" shouted Andrew Sourk from atop his warm-up bike.  Well, I suppose everyone needs a hobby.  He then got Triage down the road at 28.72 mph, over 10 faster than he managed last time he was here, when his only run with a working bike was spannered by a non-working knee and subsequent one-legged finish.

The local cattle flee in terror as The Inseminator gets Triage off the line

Mike Mowett finally deigned to run VeloX S with the lid on and decked three times.  We put him into heat two, switched launcher to Scott Wilson and watched as our tame statistician did a 46.88, which will allow him to run the full course in the morning.

Mike Mowett - not waving but downing

Someone has dragged the Seiran, built by Mark Anderson and Eric Ware for Teagan Patterson a couple of years back, out of a cupboard in the Civic Center.  A couple of the women on the Cal Poly team were eyeing it up if the tyres are not as shot as they appear and a suitable rider restraint can be confected.  We'll see what happens.

The Super 8 has started producing chocolate-chip cookies at 4 pm. Om nom nom nom and then out to 305 again.  "Look, see!" exclaimed a passing Livepooligan.  "We have put some car window tinting film over our naughty camera and Made It Good!"  An optimistic Yasmin was sent off down the road at the tail end of heat one.

ARION5 briefly under full power
I do not know why this picture is so dark

And pulled up less than a mile later with a return of the transmission trouble the team thought they had sorted on Sunday.  Ken had a standby slot for the third heat but they discovered a brand-new cut in a tyre that hadn't been there earlier, so would not have run even had a slot become available.  Instead we squeezed Titan into the final heat, but they failed to get going with something amiss in or near the bike's headset.  Seems they had tried to fix it with the aid of a chunk of soft drink can inna-Zen-and-the-Art-of-Motorcycle-Maintenance-stylee, which had not worked.

Everyone else made it down the road OK, albeit with variable wind behaviour.  There was, I'm told, excitement in the Italian camp after Vittoria's run, and a second dose after Andrea's, with the figure "134" being heard clearly enough for this non-Italophone to translate.  Kilometres, obv.  But neither Vittoria's 74.55 nor Andrea's 84.52 had legal wind.  Rosa did, but was tonight 0.03 mph slower than Vittoria.  Instead it was IUT Annecy who got the run of the weather, with Fabien Canal pedalling Altaïr 6 to a new European record of 84.99 mph.  Second on the all-time list behind Todd Reichert.  Not to be outdone, Ilona Peletier broke Rosa Bas' freshly minted world record with 77.10 mph.  I've been consulting Statto Mowett's Great Big List of Everything but have not been able to find an occasion in the history of the event wherein two different riders set new world records in the same class.

And this morning they made her drive the van...

Two more days and the weather is alleged to be getting properly hot again.  This could get very interesting.