UK Bike Park has become a popular venue in the South with its interesting uplift service and range of mountain bike trails including several downhill tracks, free ride and North Shore areas and a 4X track which has been used on a National Level.

Although UK Bike Park races are one day events, they always have the uplift service open on the Saturday giving the opportunity for non racers to ride and the eager racers to sneak in some extra practice and with such good weather loads turned up.

UK Bike Park always bring a relaxed atmosphere at their races for everyone even though elites do turn up fighting for those precious points.  Trophy hunters or not a £100 cash prize for fastest time of the day really gets the racing going for the big guns and with £30 cash on top for each category winner there is quite a bit to go for. This weekend saw a twist though with the organised hijack of the race for the UK Hardtail Championship organised by Ace from Hardtail Nation.

The track used was a mix match of different tracks at the bike park and unlike some of the races where it has been a little of a mystery, UKBP told people what was being raced on the forum well in advance. NATURAL, TOP SECTION OF DARKSIDE, DEVIL'S DYKE & LOVE HUMPS, it might not mean much to everyone, but it defiantly got the locals practicing the track, if it wasn’t taped on Saturday I wouldn’t have known what track to attempt practice on though.

The track started off down the start ramp and across and relatively flat but fast section before dropping off a fire road and into the steep part of the course.  The steep section of the track caused some slight pile ups in practice.  It was one corner that baffled most riders, the ‘chalky corner’ which was a tight right hander with went nearly 180 degrees around and dropped about 6 feet.  It was a challenge to most rider’s, Lee Huskinson seemed to make it look very easy in his first and winning run of just 1.14, my guess is that’s where he won it.  The exit of this corner was hard as well going tight between trees and with the track falling away to the left meaning you had to be very precise on exit or you were down.  In the wet this might have caused a problem...

If you got around this the next hard bit was at the top of the fast straight near the bottom with some tightly marked of camber roots.  Rarely here did you see many riders get through cleanly until Ash Mullane and a few other where somehow doubling out of it!  From here you went almost straight over some jumps, across a road gap and round into to the finish.  After the weekends riding i was enjoying the course, but it defiantly needed some work.  Some of the corners where quite blown out and there wasn’t much of a sign of any course maintenance on the track, which was needed.  Although downhill is meant to be challenging, for a grass roots race series some of the track could have been modified a bit to make the riding a lot more enjoyable for more people.

Above is Mr Hardtail Nation himself, Ian ‘ACE’ Woodley, this is the guy who has made the Hardtail Champs happen.  He also organised great prizes for all that participated rather than your regular 1st, 2nd and 3rd including issues of Fastlane Mag, Spank Components and prizes from TF Tuned.

Practice was a little late getting started on Sunday, but once it got going it went smoothly and the uplifts ran at a decent speed for the rest of the day.  Practice was extended a little which of course pushed racing back, but this wasn’t much of a problem as racing didn’t finish too late.

Race runs went smoothly with no major problems or delays followed by the seeding results being released for the second runs.  This was done slightly differently from the norm as all categories were mixed as they went down, mixed opinions floated around the pits on this decision.  Some impressive times were clocked throughout the race.  Ben Baker, riding Hardtail after coming back from injury got a 1.22 with Andy Payne and Ben Deakin, who was also racing in Senior all down in the same second.  When Ben Deacon came down in his second run though he took the Hardtail Champs title with an impressive 1.20 which would have placed him high in his age category

Full Results can be found here

Visit the UK Bike Park Forum on SDH here for more events

www.ukbikepark.moonfruit.com

Photos by Jacob Gibbins

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