Phil, Robby, Vincent and Will trickle their bikes up to the start gate. Over the clattering of valves and popping pistons I can hear Will giving Vincent a mouthful of smack talk, laughing at him for having a rubbish bike and letting him know in no uncertain terms he's going to beat him up the hill. Vincent plays it cool, he nods and laughs, flicks his fag into the dirt and hangs over the bars.
In an instant the four bikes tear out of the gate, all power wheelies and roosts of hillside being showered over the crowd behind. Thirty seconds and 500 metres later Will beats Vincent by just half asecond. Wow, this is cool.
Proper race bikes being ridden by hardmen is something you would expect to find on this here website, but take a closer look at the pictures. Everyone here is a bit, well, old really. The combined age of the four guys mentioned above is 218. Ridiculous in its own right until you calculate the age of the bikes they're riding. 264 years' worth of rust, racing and repairs on bikes that look like they should be on museum walls, or in skips depending on your point of view. Excellent.
The original plan was for me to race a bike up this hill. Things were looking good and I was determined my results would look better than last year's Weston beach race disaster. However, a couple of days before the event the bike I was supposed to ride fell through. Or apart, or something. Frantic calls led to nothing. These bikes aren't as easy to get hold of as you might think. Every single one of the 170-odd bikes entered was somebody's pride and joy.
Borrowing modern bikes is a fairly easy process - you promise to replace any parts that get damaged and away you go - but I'd struggle to replace a side panel on a '68 Mabsa 500 (whatever that may be). The connection these people had with their machines was so much stronger than I've seen with modern bike owners, and people unsurprisingly showed reluctance to let a journo with zero classic riding experience learn on theirs.
Bikeless and glum, walking round the paddock I started checking the bikes out. I was fairly certain that people only rode horses until about 1979, but I was wrong, they had bikes too. The most popular choices were single cylinder four-stroke BSAs from the mid-60s. There were so many interesting bikes to check out I didn't really know where to start. The names on the petrol-tanks were bizarre: Walwin, Cheney Jawa, Luckhurst Jap, Tribsa. All of these were new to me and it felt great to not know everything about every bike like I'd expect myself to at a modern event.
I was fooling nobody in the pits in my plight to borrow another bike though and my patter led to nothing. I was wary of the fact that, like most old people, these boys liked to talk. Everyone I spoke to wanted to tell me everything about their bikes, which took some time. Eventually they'd pat me on the head, call me "boy" and send me on my way, minus a ride. I would be watching this one from the sideline. Arse.