If it’s raining, it must be Belgium… again!

I got my annual fix of endurance racing at Spa again at the weekend, when I went over to the 6 hour endurance race there on Saturday.

Unlike last year when the race continued into the night and finished at midnight, this year the race came to a halt at 8:30 in the evening. As I’d spent the morning re-exploring Luxembourg, a place I hadn’t been for 25 years, that meant I missed the start of the race.

It was good to see Phase One Endurance back again, even if this was a non-championship event, with Hugh Brasher and Scott Smart finishing 15th on a Yamaha.

Also competing were Stephane Mertens and Didier de Radigues. Whilst Mertens still competes regularly I can’t remember the last time I saw de Radigues competing anywhere.

As far as I could work out they were headed for third place on their BMW, when Mertens took a tumble at Eau Rouge in the rain that dampened the track in the last 20 minutes of the race. They eventually finished 8th.

The event was won by Huyskens, Dierickx and Vos on another BMW.

On the Sunday, there was a full programme of Belgian national championship races, and I watched those in pouring rain. It started just about the time the first bikes appeared for warm-up, it was still raining when I left at 3pm and it only stopped raining when I was about 50 miles from the channel.

For once, I wasn’t at all unhappy to be on four wheels rather than two!