...following the oh-so-narrow dry line that clips the apex and sweeps out to the left of Park Straight. No problem with grip on the dry tarmac, tyres biting hard, and the bike feels rock solid as I wind the throttle open, but I really don't fancy drifting off onto the damp tarmac at this angle of lean. Shit, this feels just so good! Upright now and I whack the throttle open just a tad too swiftly in a burst of exhilaration fuelled over-exuberance. What's this? Clutch slip? No, wheel spin I realise as the BT57 hooks up again and I flash past the entrance to pit lane and over the grid, the angry howl of a V4 at full chat reverberating off the pit wall as I snick up through the gears. Then suddenly the hundred metre board for the hairpin looms and I hit the brakes - and it all goes horribly pear-shaped. I'm not slowing down, and the front end has gone all light and unresponsive - for a moment I'm confused, then I realise... shit, the front wheel has locked, and I'm sliding towards Hatchets hairpin at 100mph, expecting to land on my arse any second. A split second, thirty yards and an overdose of adrenaline later, I'm off the front brake and back on, more gently... phew, I survived... but now I'm running out of room, and it dawns on me straight away that I'm not going to make it. It's a sickening realisation, and half my mind is focussing on scrubbing off as much speed as humanly possible without locking up either front or rear again on the wet part of the track that I find myself on, and the other half is frantically trying to recall what I'm going to plough into head on at 40mph. All I can see in my mind's eye is a solid earth bank with a few lorry tyres embedded in it. This is going to hurt like fuck. Shit, that marshal is going to have an excellent view of the smash... oh! Thank fuck for that! Yes, there is a patch of tarmac on the outside of the hairpin, put there to save people who balls it up like I just did! I'd just not noticed it before, but I'm glad of it now as instead of turning in I ride the front brake and my luck all the way into the run-off area, and do a sheepish U-turn to rejoin. That's what I get for going out before the track had properly dried out after lunch!

I'd turned up at 10am, signed on and bimbled off to the pits. Within 5 minutes, just long enough to take off the top box, I was heading out of pit lane on a sighting session behind an experienced Pembrey racer - I did two of these in the morning, since I was anxious to get the lines straight in my mind. The track was pretty much dry, except for a mini lake right on the exit to Hatchets where the drains were still failing to cope with the deluge of the previous day, and after a few laps at moderate pace I started to get to grips with the circuit. There are a couple of nasty wrinkles, Hatchets being the worst, but on cold tyres the bike was very skittish around Brooklands, a very deceptive corner which you needed to turn into so, so impossibly late if you weren't going to run out of track on the exit. The kink half way up the back straight at Woodlands is a real test of bravery, and I only managed it flat once because I forced myself to on my last lap of my final session on an all but dry track. And funnily enough, on a cool day, with a not perfectly dry track, a tyre-cooling bath half way round, and the desperately square all-but-shagged BT57's my bollide is still wearing, the only place on the track that I got anything down was at the end of the only left hander on the track, a big sweeping inny-outty affair called Dibeni, where I was able to convince myself that the track was dry enough to just go for it, dragging the left side of my boot and the hero blob through the apex.

Something I didn't get used to at all, of course, was the psychopathic racer factor. There were four of them out there mingling with the saner punters, three on sports bikes and one, a motocross racer, on a KMX500 fitted with wide, sticky track rubber. The nutso GSXR750 rider distinguished himself by blasting through the non-existent gap between me and the edge of the track on the exit from Brooklands at silly speed, and on the entry to Dibeni I had a Ducati 748 ride right under me at high velocity, while the other psycho on a Fireplace went the other side. Mental. The KMX rider, meanwhile, was certifiably insane; what else do you call somebody riding round the outside of Fireblades on a fast corner with their foot planted on the deck? His finest moment was blasting out of Dibeni sideways, boot on the deck speedway style at about 80mph, and taking out the cone marking the exit aiming point to the corner, which was planted right up on the kerb. Utterly, utterly barking!

I must go back there next year, because on a hot sunny day, on sticky tyres, I could do some real damage round there.

Ken Haylock [VFR750FL]