Watched you race and tinker Rob, bike looked good. Too bad you could not make it to the finish, I saw so many people 'helping' around your bike already when troubles happened that we decided to watch it from a distance. With van Schijndel on the bike was flying indeed I believe he passed 6 riders in the first round ... after starting 20 seconds behind everybody ? Guess he had a score to settle after he fell off the at the Le Mans start ;-) why did that happen ?.
Such a shame they could not finish, but I think in the end... of the 50 bikes only about half made it to the finish ?
So sorry we did not spoke to eachother......but hope you enjoyed the 'race'. Yes, Tonny is, at his respectable age of 68yrs, still a force to be reckoned with. Unbelievable how he manage to be so smooth and fast. But then again he's a double 24 hr winner, several 2nd and 3rd places. Ran a factory RCB endurance bike for years and a multiple Dutch champ. He fell at the start when the bike was at steering lock and tipped over. Luckily no harm done, so he set off after the pack with the bit between the teeth!
There are lot of pic's of him and young Arnaud riding around (much) faster bikes, bike runs very well and is very stable and the braking is awesome. We had a almost perfect day, till Tonny lost the (new) drivechain. Chain is recoverd by fans the day after, so when I receive it I can see what went wrong with it. One of my sons, together with Arnaud, recovered the bike while my other boy ran for the chain (back in the van). No chain tooling on hand, so several very nice spectators, and my sons, set of to find some. Someone came with a grinder so we used that to shorten the chain. When mounted I put Arnaud on the bike and into the race. When he came past, the bike sounded somewhat rough so decided to call him in. The engine was covered in oil, due to blown gasket, and the rest is history. First take a few days to recover and than dismantle the top-end to see what is
wrong.
Cheers, Rob
PS. On bottom pic of Tonny you can see some smoke coming out of the crankcase breather, think that was the start of it all.