The French and their weather

I returned from the French trackday in a small town called Croix-en-Ternois the other day, with a sore ass, and a great appreciation for French food.

26 of us hired the track out for the day, and about ten rode down, eight missed their ferry meaning we had to wait for them on the other side. Once all together, one of the organisers had planned a more scenic route to the hotel we were staying in, in a beautiful town called Arras, avoiding as many autoroutes as possible. This is a common thing for this particular trackday group of friends, we normally have a good blast up to the hotel/circuit which means we get more out of the weekend than just track-time. Unfortunately along the way we had one rider, Fredy, crashed into a ditch after running wide on a corner. Both bike and rider were unscathed, though Fredy felt sore for a couple of days as he didn't let go of the bike and slammed into the ditch with it.

The only bad thing I could say about France is that they have this annoying habbit of placing automated fuel-stations along their roads, which only accept French bank cards. Just what is the point in this? Have they not heard of Visa/MasterCard?? We arrived at the hotel 25 miles into our reserve fuel tanks, just in time for a shower, change of clothes, some drinks and food.

The weather forecast had changed throughout the preceeding week from miserable to moderately miserable. We woke up the next day to be greeted with a dry ground and ominous, heavy but white clouds. After riding to the track and nearly losing a rider along the way due to a communication problem, we got setup and jumped out on track rather quickly, in case the skies opened up. The circuit is very small and tight, but at least it has enough corners to keep us entertained. I spent the first couple of sessions getting a feel for it and experimenting with different lines through all the corners, as every single one of them was technical and confusing. I had a great ride with the fastest guys on track, keeping pace and having some fun, before losing them to the horizon.

Unfortunately, after the third session, the weather got too bad for us to continue riding with our summer tyres, so we all called it a day, all of us apart from the race team guys and their wet-weather setup bikes! I took Grants supermoto out on the track whilst it was raining and these boys were going round the outside of me, knee down, in the pissing rain! Amazing to watch.

The evening after the trackday was pretty cool, there was a festival on in Arras and everyone was partying hard. We had a great dinner together as a group and then when everyone was suitably oiled up with alcohol, we hit the fun-fair and bashed each other up good and proper on the bumper-cars and a few others decided to see if their dinners would stay down and go on this massive swirling ride that went 200 feet up in the air, jeez. Trying to get to sleep was a nightmare, everyone was taking the piss and being noisy in the hotel, then after a couple of hours sleep, one of the guys who stayed out getting even more pissed, set off all the bike alarms and got me out of bed, only to have him try to wrestle me and my mate into a fountain. We got him back though, taped up his bike good and proper with duck-tape and swapped over his numberplate with a friend :)

More pictures to come soon, but for now there's some snaps in the gallery. My digital camera decided to play dead before the trip so I had to rely on friends for pictures.