awesome Assen with HARC and CRT, 13/14 July 2013

After a nice drive, with a dinner break in Hoogeveen, we arrived at the paddock in Assen on Friday night. We were prepared this time, we brought bicycles with us, to cover the distances between our part of the paddock, riders info and riders welcome centre...no unnecessary walks this time! Clearly we are not used to paddock sizes like these!
After installing our camper vans and the opening of a bottle of cold beer it’s always wonderful to meet up with everyone.

After the last outing, the Classic TT of Elst, organized by SAM, we had to fix the left float chamber attachment..it simply broke off. Was it "the jump"? The wobbly return rides into the paddock? Or just sheer vibrating force any single cylinder rider knows about?? We’ll never know, fact remained it had to be fixed.
With help of our kind UK friend (thanks Bob!) parts were in house very quick and the float chamber was back were it belongs.

So the first outing, Saturday mornings’ qualifying, at Assen, was a test really, to see how the Velocette would do. Picking up from low revs was not as smooth as hoped for and John noticed it was only out of quicker right hand corners the problem would occur.
This problem couldn’t stop us from having a great time at what we think is the best track we ever had the pleasure of riding on, Assen is great, great fun!



When you are in a paddock with 34 outfits there’s always someone who knows and asking around resulted in the conclusion the float chambers’ mounting hight (compared to the carb and right hand float chamber) could be causing this stuttering on the gas..
Too high, not enough- and too low, too much fuel.. Indeed lowering the chamber resulted in better picking up in the first regularity heat on Saturday, but it was still not optimal,. Something to work on and test in Sundays’outing.

The race on Saturday resulted in a battle to stay on the black no.28 Beemers’ tail, and trying to pass Anja and Diana on their 750 Triumph Bonneville, which worked out for say half a lap. A few missed gear changes and Anja overtook us again. Big fun though to do battle with the 16 inch kneelers with our ancient big wheeler.

The reluctance of the Velo to change gears caused a bit of worry though, John on Saturday night: “I hope the clutch stays in one piece”.. and that of course is challenging the Gods...
The second heat on Sunday: after a once again succesfull push start (thanx mr. Braas!) the Velo ran fine while waiting for the signal to enter the track.. once the signal was there John kicked in first gear..and that was the end of the clutch…
No more track hours for us the rest of the weekend, instead we have fixing hours ahead of us to finish in time to start in Barneveld!

We thank HARC, CRT and MON for a wonderful weekend!

See you in Barneveld!