Back at home. Yesterday, I did the eight our Iceni Rally in East Anglia with Johannes as my pillion. We had quite a good plan worked out and started at 9 a.m. from Cambridge. The morning was basically a long ride on farm roads until we reached Norwich in the early afternoon. Here we were enough ahead of the plan to add another big point at the coast. Last year, on the XBR500, this seemed so much easier, but riding with a ~630 kg bike on some back roads is a physical challenge.

Team Pan, East Anglia North Coast.

I was often not very well focused and missed quite some turns. As a consequence, I could not add two smaller extra locations close to the finish, the was only time for one. And then I had a cunning idea: instead visiting the closer and more obvious one for 150 points, I decided to skip it and get to the other location worth 285 points. Only a small difference, but from my personal experience I knew that rallies are decided in the very end and a few points can make all the difference. The problem was that this route would result in getting four minutes late and thereby getting 200 penalty points. So, if I could catch up two minutes, I would still have a benefit. 30 minutes to go, give it a try! It worked, Johannes was a quick pillion at the bonus point as before and in the end we even arrived before the normal finish time. I counted 12.623 points, that sounded quite a lot; I had been optimizing the route during the last days. In the end there was no extra trophy for the best team (I was hoping for that one), only for the best newcomer. Third place went to Steve Eversfield, and then there were only John Young and us left. The difference between first and second place was a mere 99 points!!! Finally, the risky stunt with the last bonus point location had paid off and we came first! John was very disappointed coming second like this, but he shouldn’t be, because he rode a great rally and missed the first place by only 0.8 %! That’s basically a draw.

After the ceremony, we headed with both bikes to the Tunnel and arrived at 2 a.m. at my place. And interesting experience riding with pillion in a rally, but riding in East Anglia is better done on the small XBR! 🙂

Winning route Iceni Rally 2016