In this, his latest Edinblog, Ian Hawkins includes photographs and text of the arrival at Armadale of the great Barry Briggs and sums up the start of the season at Edinburgh.
Moving on from a very successful two-day practice session we arrived at our first meeting, a re-run of the 2009 Keyline Scottish Open Championship. As it turned out the day had a distinctively Swindon flavour but more of that later. The major off track happening was the re-flagging of all the flag poles using a JCB platform hoist with human interface by Graeme Campbell and Ronnie Anderson.
While this was going on we were interrupted by the arrival of three motorcyclists and a 4WD support vehicle. This was 4-times World Champion (and one of my personal favourite riders) Barry Briggs with son Tony and two assistants. Barry was on a ride from John o'Groats to Cardiff taking in speedway tracks on the way to raise funds for wheelchair-bound ex riders, and Armadale was his first call. It was great to meet Barry after last seeing him win the BLRC in 1967. Barry then spent much of the day buzzing around the stadium and track including giving a lift to our own Neil Hewitt..
Other work involved resetting the clamps on the safety fence boards which seem to move in behind fence posts between meetings, a job which was not helped by our cordless drill seizing up. However a shot of WD40 partially cured the problem.
The meeting was very good on a dryish track with some first-bend incidents and some fairly hairy moments mostly involving Kevin Wolbert who was reduced to using his long-track motor which was not the ideal for our teeny track. One incident saw Kevin's riderless machine fly over half the length of the home straight, on the wrong side of the white line, narrowly missing the start-gate crew of Jim Syme and Alex Gibson.
The meeting concluded with a final involving Andrew Tully, Andre Compton, Ryan Fisher and eventual winner James Wright who had first pick of the gates and won fairly comfortably.
Apologies for the quality of some of the photographs!
