Did you hear the one about the Englishman, Irishman, the Italian and the Australian? Well, this was no corny old joke, in fact riders from these nationalities filled the top 4 places at the new White Mountain Enduro.
The Irish Championship has a long overdue new venue to add to the calendar. Based near New Ross, Co. Wexford this was the first competition held on this land and the amount of work that went into preparing the course was seemingly never ending. The team led by Colin Maher worked tirelessly to prepare the course and the dry weather in the run up to the event was encouraging, but a last minute deluge of heavy rain left the virgin course vulnerable and some sections had to be cut during the later part of the day. The course started and threw riders straight in at the deep end – literally – as the opening few KMs were very wet and very muddy, then in contrast, the two long and rocky hillclimbs that ran alongside recently burnt moorland later in the lap were almost dusty in sections.
So along with the new course came some new riders, Josh Green comes from a land far,far away, no, not Cork he’s actually from Australia and now lives in Dublin but isn’t allowed in the UK due to some Visa issues, so instead of riding in the Sprint Enduro Championship across the pond with the rest of his team, Josh sampled the delights of an Irish championship. Fresh off the box at the Portugal WEC, the Electraction TM rider went into this race as favorite and didn’t disappoint, posting red hot test times on a 144cc bike he’d never ridden before as his WEC bike was still en route back, Josh won his first race in his adopted country. Next in the experts was Bray’s Paul Mcloughlin who had plotted a fast route through the forest and set a consistent pace to take second place. English import Reevesy was 3rd on the VMX KTM, 19 seconds down on Paul and fourth place was the Italian Andrea Bassi, who spent most of the race struggling with a broken gear lever that just wasn’t that easy enough to change at the time check. 15 expert riders went out but only 7 made it to the finish, showing how tough the 4 x 1.5 hour laps were.
In the Seniors only 4 riders out of the 13 starters made it, these were led by Paul McCarthy, who not only won the tests but remained clean on time. 2nd place went to Danny Balmforth, 3rd was Dakar rider Phil Noone and 4th Alan Graham, both lost a stack of time but were credited with a finish.
The test was a fast affair with some nice straight ‘corridors’ through the trees to start with and a couple of interesting loops up and down across the forest track. A sharp right on to a steep double lane track took the riders up out of the forest to a clearing but the Clerk of course felt it needed some more, so the riders then dived back down hill via a snotty, muddy track before coming back up to the clearing where the ‘TEST END’ banner was lofted high in the trees and was a welcome sight for most as they pushed hard to get to the light beam.
Chad Hamilton won the Clubman class even though he lost a minute thanks to some unbelievable test times and Willy Gammell was disappointed not to take the win after doing his best to clean the course. Vincent Price made it into 3rd place as the clubman class also saw high levels of riders failing to finish.
The Sportsman class had 2 laps to do of this tough course and only a third of them finished with Gary Yeates piping Richard Murphy to the win by 22 seconds. William Dalton was third as only 5 riders out of the 12 finishes remained clean on time.
Hopefully this will be the first of many visits to this course and we at Enduro.ie would like to thank all involved in setting up this new venue.
The next race will be the Glendalough Enduro on the 16th of May.
See you there.
Report by Reevesy for www.enduro.ie
