ESCA 23.92m 2up Team TT – Sunday 3rd April 2016 – GS/839
We’ve been talking about doing a two-up tt for a while, so the early season Esca 23.9 seemed like a plan. A gentle course recce on Friday evening quickly turned into Mikey destroying my legs for an hour, but with Saturday to recover, it was good preparation for what was to come and also meant I wouldn’t go off course AGAIN!
Race day; we reckoned on 1 hour dead being a reasonable time and set our sights on going under this. We set out with intentions of 1 minute turns leading, followed by extended turns by Mikey if I started to tire. This isn’t exactly how it worked out and I think they were more like 5 minutes, with Mikey taking longer and longer turns on the front, including an impressive final effort after I overcooked it leading up the hill out of Lewes. With the odd shout of “slow down Mikey”, we crossed the line in 01:00:11, so annoyingly close to our target. It’s at this point we discovered that we were about 5 minutes out with our idea of a good time, placing 20th of 26 finishers.
Next year with some better structure to our 2-up technique, we will go 5 minutes quicker, just wait and see, I might have recovered by then! If Mikey’s plans of a pro contract have paid off by then, he’ll just have to take a Sunday off!
An excellent course, and really well run event. Real coffee at the HQ was a pleasant surprise too, well done Eastbourne Rovers!
Luke
