British Scooter Endurance Club – Round 3 | The Tside6

The third and final round of the British Scooter Endurance Club Championships took place recently at a fairly wet Teesside Autodrome. This was the seventh BSEC event since its inception in September 2019 and it just gets better and better.

Get involved

If you’ve not yet ‘got into’ scooter endurance racing as either a competitor or spectator you’re missing a real treat. It’s such an accessible and affordable way to get involved in racing. There are classes for everybody from complete novice road riders to those with a past (or present) in scooter/bike racing.

It’s already proving attractive to some riders who have never even sat on or looked at a classic scooter until they tried BSEC. At this round we had a few experienced pit bike riders who were instantly quick on the Foster 58 Lambretta. There was also a pit bike champion riding the #77 Diese Blutige Mobile Chikane Maico.

If you want to build yourself an endurance racer over winter or want to know more about the sport visit the BSEC website.

31 teams

This third meeting (and second visit to Teesside) of the year saw 31 teams on track for the six-hour event. That’s quite a few more than were there in July – date clashes with rallies/holidays etc. meant numbers were down in mid summer. More bums on seats equals better racing and it helps to keep the costs down.

A three-hour Friday evening practice session gave everybody a good chance to test their wheel changing skills as heavy showers meant it was a choice of wets, dries and a mixture of the two. We changed tyres at least three times on the Friday evening as conditions changed.

Saturday morning arrived and as bacon fried in the pan, anticipation grew in the paddock. With endurance racing there’s never much time before the action starts and after a riders’ briefing the track was open at 9am for one and a half hours of qualifying. Fast laps were set on a dry track and the grid was formed for a Le Mans style running start.

RIP Ma’am

Her Majesty The Queen had sadly passed away just before the event so a two minute’s silence was held at 11am, you could hear a pin drop on the grid. As a mark of respect our riders all wore black armbands on our leathers, made in true scooterboy fashion using black duct tape.

Dropping the flag – and a scooter

After a round of applause the scooters were started and it was time for Keith Terry to drop the Union Flag and get the race underway. Pole setters, Hornet Racing (#6) lead from the start, SLUK Racing (#71) with Sticky on board got us up from fourth to second pretty quickly with Hornet Racing’s second team (Team Also #3) in third. James Lancaster (RFS Tune #111) dropped the scooter on the start line but soon got going again (check out Andrew Sharkey’s face as he cheers the riders away in the image above).

As usual, Jon the Greek was flying for Hornet Racing, aside from his usual wheelies Jon is also prone to stoppies when braking into corners. but sadly the scooter suffered a crank failure after just 7 laps, leaving SLUK Racing to take the lead. After a lot of faffing around in the paddock Hornet got back out on a spare bike (pictured above) but had to incur a 20-lap penalty as a result. It wasn’t a good day for the fastest team on the track.

Catch up on all the race action

We’re not going to bore you with lap by lap, or hour by hour commentary on the race action. You can see all of that on the Alpha Timing YouTube video (although it was live on the day it’s still there for you to watch in full). What was evident at this meeting though was that some teams are getting faster and more professional at every meeting. They’re honing their rider changes and fuel stop strategies. They’re taking things a little more seriously (except maybe the United Colours of Bemberton pictured above) than they were in the early days of BSEC. Even so, it’s still a very friendly and welcoming paddock where people will muck in to help out, lend tools and parts if possible and try to keep everybody on track.

After a dry first 50 minutes of the race a heavy drizzle set in, at Teesside that means the track gets very slippery. Thanks mainly to the karts and drift cars which use the circuit on a regular basis. Numerous slides and crashes happened throughout the day but in six hours of racing there were no red flags, no need for medical support and as far as I know there were no injuries other than the odd scuff and bruise (although Tony Higgs wrote off his Arai, grazed his knee and badly bruised his thumb).

Race strategy

SLUK Racing were out for the first time at this meeting on a brand new Quattrini M160 S engine, with Crimaz gearbox and clutch. Sticky had made a fantastic job of building it and had detuned it by around 4bhp to make it more rider friendly for this circuit. It was an absolute pleasure to ride. We’ll be covering that engine build in more detail in an article over the next few weeks.

We made the wise decision to swap to wets at our first rider change, this cost us around seven minutes in the pits and dropped us back to sixth. RFS Tune took the lead before crashing out, this allowed Spire tarmac Terriers to lead for a while. We clawed our way back into the lead by lap 61 and remained the for the rest of the day. We stayed on the wets for the whole race. Although at times the track dried out it still proved to be a winning strategy and Sam Round rode a faultless last session putting in his quickest lap times in the wet on very worn tyres.

Although the crashes and injuries were fairly minor the same can’t be said for the scooters, numerous bent and twisted machines were quickly patched up to get them to the chequered flag. Some of the smarter teams are adopting specially made clip on handlebars to stop the needless slaughter of vintage aluminium and to speed things up if the bars do get damaged in a crash.

In a six hour mainly wet endurance race there’s a good chance one of your team will bin it at least once. Sticky threw his 90SS down the track in the first hour, I did the same in the sixth hour whilst leading the race. Luckily no obvious damage and the scooter was still rideable. Although after Sam took the chequered flag we noticed the handlebars had snapped and the front brake lever and master cylinder were hanging on by a thread. It had survived almost an hour like that. Lucky escape!

What an idiot

Talking of crashing, a week before the event a new non-scooter riding ‘Independent Idiots’ team member had been road testing Martin McGowan’s Vespa PX (#70) when he crashed quite heavily and hit a car. The crash wrote the scooter off, injured the rider and Martin bravely borrowed his wife’s PX to use as a surrogate race scooter. Wayne Spooner was drafted in as a replacement rider and he fitted in naturally with the other team idiots. That scooter was crashed at least five times during race day and I wouldn’t have liked to have been Martin on the journey home being nagged by wife, Toni!

Loads ‘a money

London Lambretta Club (#4) were another team who were flying during the race, veteran racer Jerry Sanders doesn’t hang about. Sadly they had a few misfortunes that kept them further down the results than they deserved (and plenty of crashes) but I think they’ll be ones to watch for next year. Bizarrely for about 20 laps on the exit of one of the corners there was a wallet lying in the middle of the track, it was bulging with cash so obviously belonged to somebody from the south of England. It turned out to be London Lambretta Club’s Matt Thompson. He’d gone out on track with a waterproof coat on with his car keys and wallet in his open pocket!

Both Foster 56 and 58 were going well and looking good on track (although 58 had to retire during the race), they’ll be another team to watch for next season if those young pit bike jockeys are back in the saddle.

Valley Scooter Club’s #210 was one of many PXs racing at Teesside, it’s an affordable machine to use in endurance racing.

It was good to see Bob Monkhouse’s home-built ‘Challenger barrelled’ pink Lammy back out on track. You may remember the feature we did on Bob’s homemade streamliner? Bob’s Lammy was on the pace and fielded the youngest rider, Ben Readings – a clever young lad who rides a self built geared electric Lambretta on the road.

A solid performance

For me though the team of the meeting were Team Solid Air (#13), not only had Mark Bennett ridden it 200 miles from Cambridge but after winning Road Class it was ridden back home again. Well done, a great effort and a true Road Class team.

IDK Racing

Mungo’s IDK Racing (#347) took the Club Class win, a very fitting result for a team that really put everything into this sport. Not only does Mungo get very very excited, his enthusiasm is contagious, but they also set up the funding page to make sure this event was given live coverage once again. Well done all at IDK.

Pro Race isn’t quite as well supported as it should be really, some of the BSSO teams prefer to concentrate on that race series and don’t want to risk a championship due to an injury/bike issue sustained a couple of weeks before their season finale. Talking of injuries, SRP’s Stuart Day was absent after a paddock accident earlier in the year, we hope he’ll be back out of retirement soon.

Hornet Racing did field a new Pro Race team on a Production Class Vespa PK though, made up of BSSO racers Harry Smith, Lee Abrahams and Andrew Sharkey.

It was also good to see Bob West and the Real Taffspeed (#74) taking the Pro Class win.

Overall and Race Class winners

Race Class and the overall race win was taken by SLUK Racing (#71), followed by the lovely blue Vespa fielded by Valley Scooter Club and Spire Tarmac Terriers in third. You can see the full results and awards below.

Image by Daz Turner

I’d like to also mention the marshals, officials, medical staff and track crew who help to keep us safe and on track – without them we couldn’t have fun on our scooters.

Commentary

Also thanks to Alpha Live for the excellent live timing and live video feed. Plus of course to the commentary team who managed to keep chatting for six hours!

Helped in the commentary box this time by former BSSO racer Paul Green and a few guests during the day. Paul managed to bring his old Group 4 bike (#49) out of retirement for a few laps in practice on Friday, which was good to see.