BSSO season kicks off at Croft this weekend | RACE PREVIEW

After the winter break, the British Scooter Sports Organisation (BSSO) are back this weekend for a two-day meeting at Croft near Darlington.

Here are some useful bits and pieces about who is racing, what’s new, a timetable for the weekend and a few other snippets of info.

Stock classes

Stock classes continue as 4e and Production, entries are good in both classes for Croft this weekend (13 & 11, respectively). At the pointy end, Graham Tatton (Lambretta, DSC) will be looking to defend his 4e title, whilst Dave Bristow will be trying to beat him a few more times than last year on his Hornet Racing Vespa.

Green Hornet

Also gracing 4e on a Vespa will be Andrew Sharkey (returning from a year off due to injury, so no more live feeds from him!) and Harry Smith, joined by Adie Horrocks (pictured above on his special green Hornet Racing Vespa). Adie is better known for his sprinting and embarrassing BMW driver exploits.

SRP newcomer

For the Lambrettas, John Woods and John Balcomb will be looking at the upper places, and Damon Yates will be trying to consolidate last year’s successes. One of the newcomers – Christopher Middleton, has taken the less usual route into racing, starting in 4e, riding for SRP. He’s more familiar with bigger sports bikes, but he enjoyed his time with the BSEC Endurance, so much that a faster fix was needed!

Reigning BSSO Champion, Nikita has retired, which is a massive shame 

Who to watch

With Nikita Donoghue (pictured above) retired the lads might stand a chance this year! The Proddy class crown is up for grabs – SLUK regular Ben Readings certainly has his eye on the prize after coming second last year. Battle royals will no doubt continue between him, Gary Smythe and Shane Hunsdale.

Ben will also be covering Croft for ScooterLab.

More newcomers

The stalking horse for this season could well be the deceptively-quick-on-a-P-range, Brook Northey (#43) for Team Numpties, moving out of 4e for this year. Cutting their teeth in the class are Dave Cann and Scott Thompson (Young Frank as we Know him!) on Lambrettas and Plymouth man Craig Sheffield (#70) on a tasty-looking Vespa.

The Supers

Supers Classes are 6 and 5. In Group 6, Steve Wright has ‘retired’ but is back out racing. He will be doing his best on his DSC Lambretta to fend off the unwanted attentions of Ioannis Chitoglu (John the Greek) on his Hornet Vespa PK. Also in the hunt is Steves’s team-mate Graham Tatton, the 3 of them continuing to give us good value on the live feeds! With the 4e and Production riders taking advantage of extra track time, this class is the biggest with 14 riders. Group 5, we can safely say, will be won by a Hornet rider – only 3 in this class, all from the same team on bespoke “Super” Vespas.

We’ll also look forward to the rumoured arrival of a DSC Grp 5 Lambretta…

Autos

It’s hard to believe that only a few years ago, autos were the most dominant classes in BSSO. Now it’s gone full circle and at Croft, there will be only one auto on the grid! That auto is John Woods’ (up until now unseen) fully faired, Group 6a Gilera Runner ‘Fastcat’ pictured above.

Later in the season, ex-Zip rider Ryan Clipstone will be out on a rather impressive Wilkinson Racing auto so at least John will have some competition in that class. Ryan’s new bike failed noise testing at the Darley practice day recently.

Timetable & entry list

If you want to know the race timings and who is who and what class they’re in, have a look at the gallery above.

Thanks to Dave Bristow for help with this feature, and also to Paul Naylor and Kevin Gunstone for the photos.