Information’s a little thin on the ground at the moment, but yesterday Royal Leamington Spa 4X held it’s first race meet of the season. A good turn out and some rapid racing provided a cheeky peak of who’s on it, in the run up to this coming weekend’s NPS 4X season opener at UK Bike Park.

My spies tell me that a young man by the name of Elliot Simmons, riding for Chicksands Race Team, smoked the Youth category, mastering the mechanical gate to pull out leads of up to ten bike lengths or more in some of his motos. Dan Bateson took Youth, while Christian ‘Hatch’ Hatcher took second in Master. Hatch, riding for 4mountains was unlucky not to take the win and will be a serious contender at the first round of the NPS this coming weekend. Watch out for Manon Carpenter too, 4x, downhill, dirt jumps…she does them all.

Results:

Kids-1st Barney Worster
Bmx-1st Keith Sheriff 2nd lionel Akram
Juvenille- 1st Elliot Jones
Youth-1st Daniel Bateson 2nd Hugo Morgan 3rd Daniel Ingrham
Junior- 1st Elliot Simmons 2nd Sepi Arani 3rd Max Lenthal
Novice- 1st Nick Miller 2nd Alec Henderson, 3rd Luc Clarke
Senior 1st Nathan parsons 2nd chris mucklow 3rd Alistar keene
Master- 1st Dom bent 2nd Christian hatcher 3rd Jason carpenter
Womens- 1st Manon carpenter 2nd Kim bent 3rd Terri -anne-busbridge
Elite-1ST steve taylor 2nd Jordan gould

My own happy snappers, after having been instructed to get some “good race shots”, returned with the single image you see below. Apparently, I am to thank Andy Clark for his quick reactions and Grant Wilkinson for some precision ‘vanning’, which ultimately led to this piece of err photographmanship.

Scroll further down for some actual race snaps kindly provided by Ol Renison.

Here’s another report just in:

We have been hearing about Billy Cheethams new RLS (Royal Leamington Spa) 4X club/team, re-vamped venue, and race series for some time now and we were not disappointed.
It was the first day of summer and the sun was out nice and early, we were lucky as the previous practice day was disrupted by hail and rain showers throughout the day.
Sign on went well with sixty riders entered in total which of half were pre-entries, there was a huge mixture of riders some old school Rider names ready to test the track such as Rob Jarman and Scouse Mike and local 4X lads, Chris Mucklow, Simon Scruby and Nathan parsons and with the infamous Cooper man on commentary we knew the day would be full of frolics…..if we could tear him away from the Monster ladies!
Yes the Monster promo truck was there giving away some fantastic prizes along with Albany Cycles and MTB Bits.

The first Moto’s saw unheard of names looking hot to win showing that you don’t necessarily have to compete professionally to get involved.
The day was filling out nicely and we saw a turnout of at least 200 people.
As we all know with most races there was system errors with a small delay and mix up in the semi finals but this didn’t dampen spirits.
An under 10 tiny tots category filled the time delay and receiving the loudest cheers was our very own RLS 4X youngest club member Barney Worster who at only 6 years of age ripped up to take the win he even got rad air along the way! Hats off Billy Cheetham for his one on one free tuition to under 10’s.

The Final Moto’s saw some good close racing, local lad Nathan parsons was looking fast all day and took his 1st ever win and 1st ever race!
Elliot simmonds is another fast rider to look out for this year as well as Alec Henderson and Chris Mucklow. The next race will be up on www.rls4x.com shortly so keep an eye out!

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