Festival of Power 2025

Sunday 20 April 2025

I wasn’t 100% for the Thursday test day. We'd been to Prague for Lizz’s “significant” birthday and managed to bring back Norovirus as a souvenir - it wiped both of us out for a few days. By race week we were mostly recovered, but definitely still feeling the effects. Jake and Esther arrived Wednesday night, and Jake and I got up early Thursday to set up our pit area for the weekend. The girls followed later with food and supplies for the weekend. With everything set up, we chilled for a few hours and prepared the bike. Once the rest of the crew arrived we made a plan for starting the bike first thing in the morning, we all got some sleep ahead of Friday's action. Friday morning, we ran into a bit of nitro mischief. Even though the bike had sounded great just two weeks earlier, it now didn’t want to idle properly. We took our time resetting the barrel valve and idle settings. We weren’t in a rush to make the first qualifier - this is about testing, not chasing points (yet). We also got some excellent advice from seasoned friends in the paddock, including multiple European champion Read more

2025 Nitro Diaries

Monday 31 March 2025

Over the winter, real life and work took priority. In between the daily grind, the bike was stripped and cleaned. We relocated a few components for easier access and maintenance, and did our best to balance the setup. I'm really happy with how the bike stands now. We removed the fuel distribution blocks, stainless hard lines. These were replaced with showerhead fittings and equal-length braided lines to help improve fuel distribution - fingers crossed this addresses our persistent fueling issues at idle. I made the decision to skip the season opener at Santa Pod for a few personal reasons, but we did manage to make time to attend the Yam Yam test day the Monday after the event. It was a well-organized session and gave us a great opportunity to fire up the bike on nitro post-rebuild. We had a productive day: got the timing set and sorted out a couple of minor fuel leaks. Unfortunately, during testing, oil pressure dropped, halting our progress. We went through the oiling system piece by piece - lines, components, everything - and eventually traced the issue to a faulty fitting. Once replaced, all was well again. The troubleshooting took longer than we expected, Read more

An update – Finally!

Sunday 23 June 2024

Having committed ourselves to a date to test the new fuel bike and get everyone together, we went to a Run What Ya Brung at Santa Pod. Bearing in mind that the bike was a new build so new to us, all checks had been made, the fuelling had been set as well as we could, before riding it in anger on the track! We fired it up on nitro, this has to be done at the track anyway due to the phenomenal noise of the thing, the restrictions we have at present on the fuel and also not wanting to scare or annoy our neighbours! I had not ridden a top fuel bike since 2011, being the first time riding one of these huge machines for a while I obviously was a little nervous! It was great having Lizz and Jake crewing for me along with good friends Dean and Dan, they organized themselves who was doing what, and let me know so that I could concentrate on what I needed to do. By the time we had checked over the bike and made adjustments needed, we had one shot at getting on the track, for only a burnout Read more