Day 5: Battle Mountain NV

04:30 and Mr Larrington is rudely awakened by his phone's tinny rendition of "Wooden Chicken", by Jesus Couldn't Drum, heralding the arrival of an incoming txt msg.  Listen, Horseybank plc, if you want to tell me that the AA Membership Stuffs I get with my bank account now apply to my whole family¹ then write me a fucking letter.  I am FUMMIN'!

So it was a bit breezy in town and quite unseasonably warm when we set off for the course.  Except Mr Chief Starter Ligtvoet, who had to deal with a client on the phone or the intertubes or something, unless he made up the story to catch some extra zeds.  And there was a mystery hotel room key card lurking in the Blackstang.  And a mysterious stranger showed up to keep an eye on the parking area at catch:

Onoz! Is 2D Thomas!

And we spent a while waiting for the skool bus to fail to appear, and then waited some more.  And it still didn't show.  Only later did we learn that there are no longer any skool-age kiddiewinks living out in the wilds and therefore that waiting for the said bus would be futile.  Have mercy. Been waitin' for the bus all day, as the poet² sang.  Qualifiers on the short course first and getting the results right would be easier if I was looking at the right page of my notebok.  Ah yes, here we are.  Andrea did 69.15 in Phoenix while Toronto's Lincoln MacDonald ran 41.84 in Cyclone. This being a machine from the same moulds as the veteran bike Vortex - over 100 runs on 305 - but much lighter and with a completely different drive train.

Cyclone, waiting

Neither of them - in common with all today's riders - had a legal wind speed.  Alyssa claimed her legs were still suffering from yesterday's exertions and elected not to run, while Diego in the Cerberus handcycle had more issues, steering off the road and coming to a gentle halt barely 100 metres into his run.  With the road closure time window snapping shut we were unable to restart him.

Pause for moving kit and kaboodle out to the long course start for three heats of varying size. The first of which saw Russ getting Seventy Seven to 63.84 mph while Noah kept the slightly-battered Marlow out of the flora for a 44.05.

No excuses required for putting in another picture of Seventy Seven.  Ees preeti bike, Señor! Figure holding arm aloft is me indicating a legal launch to stand-in starter Hans van Vugt

In the next heat Adam in Wahoo clocked 57.68 after a fall at launch - fortunately with the crash panels still in place - and Martina in TaurusX 54.25.  Policumbent have their second female rider arriving tomorrow so Martina needs to keep on her toes...

Roughly 6/7 of Larry Lem sauntering to the aid of a stricken Adam Hari

In the third and final set of morning runs François had an early excursion into the brush but was quickly recovered, relaunched and stopped the beam at 84.72 mph.  His first run on the full course and only a thou slower than Fabien Canal's winning speed from 2019.  Having qualified earlier in the morning Andrea returned with a full run at 77.62 mph.  Peter in the DF velomobile was the last runner and ran 56.03.

Well-drilled IUT Annecy squad getting François loaded into Altaïr 6

Back to town for meetings and lunches and things.  A spectator yclept Paul has been roped in to help with timing tomorrow.  I'm hoping he can be roped in to help with the sweep car too, since he's got a Corvette Z06 which runs a supercharged 6.2 L V8 with about 650 horsepowers, which ought to be about 70 mph faster that my cranky old grid.  And we have been serenaded by Mr Organisator Krause with his Mighty Weapon:

Al & lightweight carbon-reinforced racing ukulele

Errrrm...  Now we're waiting to see what the weather decides to do - we've had a few spots of rain already and the clouds are looking ominous to the south.  Which is where we keep the course.

[Some hours later]

If you are keeping track of this on Farcebok you will already have seen Al viddying himself from the Super 8 parking lot, telling World+Dog that tonight's festivities ent happening chiz.  So i will have a nice sit down and a cup of tea instead.  At least it means spending less money on petril.

1. Which in my case I have not got
2. Billy Gibbons