The Georgetown Cup and Tour of the Campsies
The Georgetown Cup and Tour of the Campsies - September 5th 2021
Words by Cameron Adam
My first proper TT events.
2 TT’s this weekend for me both through in the west and the surrounding areas of Glasgow. First on the Saturday was the George Town Cup followed by the Tour of the Campsies the day after.
The weekend of racing started with a drive through to Glasgow on the Friday afternoon to take a recce drive round the Campsies course to get an idea for the difficulty of the hill and possible obstacles around the course, of which there were many.
Time to race. After breakfast in our premier inn we drove out to the George Town Cup TT just north of Glasgow Airport. Went through the usual malarkey of signing on and pinning on numbers and then met up with Alasdair Macmillan for a quick warm up.
The course is a practically flat 7 miles with only 1 roundabout at the far end, hard to get lost on this one, John Archibald hold the record with a 14:34. Alasdair was starting 1 place behind me as the George Town Cup is a club team event with the club that has the fastest combined time of 8 riders winning the event, maybe we could get more riders up next year?
Anyway onto the results, I finished with a 15:58 which got me 7th overall for the day and Alasdair finished with a 16:16 getting him 15th overall. Considering there was over 150 people racing I think it was a pretty successful day out for us.
Onto day 2 and race 2. The long one.
Same start to the day, breakfast, drive, number and warm up. Setting off number 6 this time for the hilly 25 mile TT. I set off and it’s almost immediately onto the infamous Crow Road, once I had tackled that it was a long winding descent with only a few technical corners towards the bottom. Now the real time trialing can begin. The rest of the loop was very lumpy and bumpy and after navigating narrow towns and mini roundabouts I arrived back at the start/finish 1:08:40 later, giving me 27th place.
As one of the other competitors said after they finished, “more of a survival course than a TT”.
As always though good fun and onto the 10 Mile Scottish National Champs in 2 weeks time.