Round 2 of the 2008 Maxxis MX Championships 1


By Stefan Paetow


Comments about the English weather; how it’s unreliable, and that you should leave the house with an umbrella and a thick, warm coat, has been the joke of many a dinner conversation. It comes therefore as no surprise that this time, on Easter Sunday, when the sun should be out and the first plants start stirring for Easter, the wind is howling across the British countryside, bringing a lot of snow with it. So what does that have to do with motocross? Plenty, because on Easter Sunday, the Sidcup & District MCC hosted the second round of the Maxxis British Motocross Championship at their home track just outside the village of Swanley in Kent.


Canada Heights is arguably one of the best-prepared rounds on the Maxxis calendar. The club is very passionate about providing quality for the riders, but ultimately, the one thing that can make or break their events is the weather. On Easter Sunday, when everyone woke up to see that thin layer of white stuff on the ground, and with heavy clouds chasing across the countryside, there definitely was more heavy weather on the way.


The second round brings with it only two of the three classes in the Maxxis; the MXY2 class, which comprises a selection of around forty youngsters on the cusp between youth and adult racing, is not invited to this round. So therefore the programme is shuffled about a bit and it is the MX2 class that goes out onto the circuit first.


Team KTM UK's Shaun Simpson, who hails from Scotland, seems to be quite at home in this weather. He posts a time of 2:27.262, almost two-and-a-half seconds faster than his Molson Kawasaki-mounted compatriot from up north, Stephen Sword. The third rider is also not from England. UTag Yamaha's Martin Barr hails from Northern Ireland. The MX1 class goes out next, and rides into a snow blizzard. Monster CAS Honda's Billy MacKenzie, or Billy Mac for short, rides that one out without any problems, after all, he's also from Scotland. His time though is a more sedate 2:31.876, while the Norwegian import for UTag Yamaha, Kenneth Gundersen, is just behind him within a tenth of a second. Welshman Mark Jones, riding for ARB Tuning Kawasaki, is third just under a second slower than Gundersen.


The stage is set for battle. The support race, which comprises the non-qualifiers of both classes, is scheduled first on the rounds that exclude the MXY2 class. Here it is a battle of classes because André David, the winner, and Luke Kennett, third, both race the MX1 class, while the man crossing the line in second, Tom Watts, is an MX2 rider, recently graduated from the MXY2 class himself.


Simpson is definitely well-prepared for the season ahead. He is the fastest one out of the gate in the first MX2 race and he runs away with the lead. Sword goes after him after getting past UTag Yamaha's Carlos Campano, but the lead that Simpson has ends up being a little too big. There are thirty-six seconds between them across the finish. Between Sword in second, and Swift Suzuki's Elliott Banks-Browne in sixth is a fifty-second gap, with each rider in-between nicely spaced out every ten seconds. It's a bit of a procession. It only gets interesting beyond seventh, where there is some movement and trading in positions.





Shaun Simpson.  

At the end of the day, Billy MacKenzie describes the day as "total domination". The first race certainly already shows signs of this, because MacKenzie, Jones and Gundersen run away from the others with a massive gap of thirty seconds on the rest of the pack. Gundersen is a bit late to the party though; he has had to get past PAR Honda's Jordan Rose first, so Jones and MacKenzie have an advantage.


Swift Suzuki's MX1 rider, Brad Anderson, comes from tenth and works his way to fourth, displacing the child wonder of the day – Scott Elderfield. Elderfield usually races in the MXY2 class, but since it's not scheduled today, he's decided to take a stab at the MX1 class with a KTM 250SX two-stroke. And surprisingly, he holds his own against grizzled MX1 veterans like Team KTM UK's James Noble and even AMA privateer Mark Eastwood. Throughout the race he keeps pace in fifth until he can get past Rose for fourth, only to be pushed back to fifth two laps from the end. Hats off for a brilliant performance.


The second support race goes to the line at 3:00pm sharp, marking the second half of the event. Again it's a battle between MX1 and MX2 riders, David vs Watts vs Raynor this time round. Watts has the upper hand in the final lap and takes the crown for the day. David is second and Raynor third.


There's another procession in the MX2 class in the second race, but the protagonists have changed. Sword has a bad start and has to come back to fourth from mid-pack, while Simpson again checks out and this time adds another ten seconds to the gap between him and Barr in second. Barr has a tough competitor in DB Racing's Neville Bradshaw who stays with him throughout the race, but can't make a pass stick after losing second place to the Irishman. Monster CAS Honda's Mike Brown makes a good recovery after he didn't manage to make a single lap around the track the first time round thanks to a mud-clogged radiator and the resulting boiled-over engine. He ends in sixth. The overall on the day is exclusively Celtic – Simpson, Barr, Sword for first, second and third.





Billy MacKenzie Vital MotocrossBilly MacKenzie.  

The final race of the day, the second MX1 race, sees a small shake-up in the top five. Jones makes a small mistake in a rut that costs him three places, allowing Anderson, Molson Kawasaki's Tom Church and Gundersen to pass him while he struggles to find neutral. He catches up to Gundersen and passes, but Anderson, Church and MacKenzie are too far ahead to make much of an impact. Jones' race positions on the day are exactly the reverse of Anderson's, so the podium ends up being MacKenzie, Anderson and Jones. Elderfield has a bad start and although he gains places and then maintains his position just outside the top ten, he can't make much progress from there. His day overall is tenth.


Of course, by this time the weather has made up its mind, too, and glorious sunshine breaks through the clouds, ending the day on a sunny, albeit cold, high. The next round of the Maxxis moves to Devon in mid-April, and one can but hope that the weather will have made up its mind about what it will be by then. Otherwise, who knows.

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