The Rockfield Novice/Trail bike Trial - 7 Dec 2013
Words: Colin. Photos: Jim Delahay. Video: Chris Harvey
Latest News: Results now available in the right hand column.
The club ran another winter trial at Roy's stream in Rockfield. Clerk of course Matt Neale got it right both with weather and severity. With class wins decided in the sections and not the special tests, though lets admit it was great fun buzzing round the stubble field. Thanks to Jules and MikeW for manning.
Matt layed out some harder variations within the standard route for everyone by wide marking and letting riders go over the tough stuff, which some of our sporting riders had a 
good go at, while the rest of us kept our noses down and brain disengaged to take the obvious lines. Later Matt said 'actually there was a marker missing from there!', but nevertheless, we all had a great afternoon's fun in surprisingly good weather.
Nibbs was in fine form on the Alp winding himself up for cleans until we formed a gallery to wind him up even more on section 10 (shown above). We persuaded him to have another go after his official attempts and there was just no way of getting out of Nick's rut.
Oh yes, it was Nick's rut - Nick, Martin and I were first there and Nick was bravest to go first. He planted a firm boot and gave the EXC some noise to just crawl out of the deep rut he'd made, with a sly glance over his shoulder at brother Martin about to go next, probably knowing he had 4" less ground clearance and would have to drag his footrests through the mud for a 3.
A number of riders gave up trying to spot which mark should go in which section and just did them sequentially so Eric Morecambe's famous quote still stands - misquoted as ' all the right marks, just not necessarily in the right order'. So any miraculous cleans may have belonged to a different section.
I managed to drive away without the results to do for a change so thanks to Vess for knocking them up and most of all a big thanks to the Breakwells for being our hosts and to the very few who did all the work again!
The Video
You don't get many YouTube vids with a sound track as good as this without copyright issues. And I love the solo performance near the middle featuring 'Headbutt Harvey'. If you listen closely at 4:10 you'll hear a subtle key change as the musician has a sudden change of pace, or could it be that "crossing those ruts was scarier than I thought!".
Thanks to Chris for showing us a superb performance through all 10 sections.