Report: RT Keedwell British Trials Championship
By John Dickinson on 21st Sep 16
JAMES Dabill secured his seventh British Trials Championship crown, and the second consecutive honour for the Vertigo factory.
Dibs took a close but controlled victory over his rivals in the ninth round of the 2016 RT Keedwell sponsored series on Sunday.
Jack Peace produced an amazing perfect display on the JST Cloburn Gas Gas to win the Youth A class but will have to wait until the last round to ensure himself of the title, being just five Championship points short after Sunday.
Jack's clean ride would have seen him take victory in the Expert class – as they ride the same sections – and that was won by fellow Gas Gas rider and Expert class leader Tom Minta on just a single mark lost.
And history was also made in the Expert class when Chris Pearson took the first podium ever on an electrically powered bike, the Electric Motion.
The event was staged by the Tynemouth and DMCC and represented a welcome brand-new round for the Championship when run at Shaftoe Crags near Belsay in remote Northumberland.
The 12 sections, lapped three times as is usual in the Championship, were all set on a compact course on a superb piece of moorland. Use of the venue is only allowed once a year and is usually reserved for a cracking north east centre event .
But this year the Tynemouth club dedicated their event to the British Championship in order to see the land achieve its full potential – and the centre rallied round to help.
The result was sections into which had clearly gone a great deal of thought, with detail attention to marker flag positions which were drilled into the rock where necessary.
End results produced scores lower than anticipated, mainly due to the unseasonably but welcome dry weather with bright sunshine on the day, but the trial was enjoyed and appreciated by all competitors.
The theme of the sections was, by necessity, variations on steep climbs, drops and steps and near vertical rock faces over the rock and boulder outcrops on the two steep sides of the natural moorland gully.
The opening section was deliberately set on the easy side but the Championship riders were in no hurry to try it and basked in the sunshine for a while before Dec Bullock showed the way.
Only casualty on that opening lap in the simple climb and drop hazard was Cornwall's Toby Martyn, who just failed to give the RCM Beta enough gas over the dusty-dry top slab and it spun to a halt.
That five contributed to a 14-mark opening lap total but Toby got it together on the last two laps to register a fine fifth on the day.
Dabill and Welsh Champ z Roberts on the TTT Beta, the latter looking confident and revelling in the sections and conditions, both made it to the ninth section without loss of marks, where this and the following tenth hazard, effectively decided the trial.
Both followed the day's format but were just more on the limit and needed a fine balance of control and aggression on the big boulders.
Iwan then blotted his copybook on the ninth with a three-mark loss while Dibs extended his clean run and was a clear leader with Jitsie R+T Gas Gas ace Jack Price having parted with a dab in the fourth sub and another on nine.
Beta UKs Jack Sheppard and JST Cloburn Gas Gas pilot Dan Peace joined The Dibsta with controlled clean rides here.
It all closed up at the tenth, though, which proved to be Dabill's bogey section.
A five here opened his scoring while a three by Price – matched only by Toby Martyn – saw them both on five marks and that's how the opening lap ended, with Dan Peace on seven and Iwan eight after he took a maximum on ten.
With the riders now having the measure of the course and sections he event cracked-on and it was just so tight at the top.
Dibs again fived the tenth as did Pricey so they were locked together on ten, while Iwan closed the gap to just a single mark thanks to escaping the dreaded ten for a two-mark loss.
Shep, Toby and TRS ace Ross Danby also posted single-mark scores, Ross fighting back from an 18-mark opener.
So, into the final circuit it was all still to play for.
All three leaders were right on it now and while Pricey did little wrong, dabs in sections six and nine condemned him to third on the day, as both Dabill and Roberts showed skill and nerve to clean the entire lap.
Jack Sheppard finished strongly losing only one mark but the damage had been done which kept him in fourth place on the day, just one place behind Jack Price.
Shep is still second in the Championship but by the reduced margin of two marks, so the battle to be 2016 vice-champion goes to the final two rounds in Scotland next month.
Others finishing strongly were Toby Martyn on five for the lap and Michael Brown, who dramatically cut his lap scores from 16 and 10 down to just two, including a clean at section 10.
This hazard was also bossed by Sam Haslam, Ross Danby and Andy Chilton.
But it was ultimately all about the winner as Dabill nailed the victory and the Championship with two rounds still to go.
James said: "It was good to come to a new venue and this is a great place and the sections were good even if they turned out a bit easy.
"A couple more as hard as nine and ten and it would have been perfect and I hope we can come back here again.
"I'm pleased to have tied-up the Championship as well as it could have gone either way today, the lads are all riding really well.
In the Expert class, Gas Gas-powered Tom Minta and Acklam's Beta-man Richard Sadler fought a day-long duel in the sun, with Tom eventually taking the narrowest of victories losing just one mark, by his own admission in one of the easiest sections – the third – on the second lap.
Both Tom and Richard had cleaned the opener and Richard then held the lead for six sections before he too succumbed to a foot down in the ninth.
The battling duo then went into the last lap glued together on a single mark before Richard dabbed in the sixth, while Tom went absolutely clean for his fourth win of the series.
More importantly, with Championship rival Dan Thorpe on the Gas Gas UK machine down in eighth, his worst finish of the season, Tom increased his title lead to a yawning 19 points over Dan.
It was then really close all the way down the order with Chris Pearson opening eyes all round the course as he showed the potential of the Electric Motion.
Its obvious low-rev torque seemed to suit the sections and scores of 7-2-4, plus two on time after a tardy first lap, saw the historic podium.
Cloburn Sherco's Tom Affleck took fourth and consolidated his thid place in the series while Gas Gas-riding Chris Alford, with sister Louise offering pointer (and as Lou has scored Women's World Championship points it is all good advice!) enjoyed his best Expert Championship result of the season in fifth, holding off Welsh Beta rider Gwynedd Jones on a tie break.
World and British Women's Champ Emma Bristow took a fine sixth posting 30 cleans, just a single five each lap stopping Emma fighting for a podium as she continually seeks to improve her all-round performance.
It is riding events like this that make Emma the champ that she is.
The Youth A class was of course was all about Jack Peace as he made that mighty impressive clean performance.
It is rare to finish any trial on a clean card, much less a Championship event and Jack kept his unbeaten record in the best possible style for a ninth successive BTC win.
Jack is an exceptional rider and fair play to his regular rivals who have supported the A class series which is contested over the Expert course and Kieran Child, Josh Hanlon and Duncan MacColl – representing England, Ulster and Scotland respectively – showed the true difficulty of the sections as they battled for the minor placings on the day and Jack Biggins, Toby Churchill and Tyler Rendell fought their way to the finish.
So with James now with his 2016 British Trials Championships tucked away, Jack Peace has one hand on the Youth A title but the Expert class looks like it could easily go down to the final round at the back-to-back finale in Scotland on the weekend of October 1-2 at the Bob Macgregor Trials Academy, Dunlop, in Ayshire.
