Tuesday July 27, 2021 at 10:08am
The third round of the 2021 ACU British sidecarcross championship took place at the Cusses Gorse circuit near Salisbury in Wiltshire. The event was hosted by the Waterlooville club and they certainly put on an excellent show for the large number of sidecar and quad followers who came along to watch.
Timed practice in the morning set the tone for the day with Stuart Brown / Josh Chamberlain putting up the fastest time with Jake Brown / Joe Millard just over one second behind. In third place was the wild card team from Holland, Gert v. Werven / Ben v. den Bogaart.
The first race unfortunately had to be red flagged following a serious accident leaving a rider with leg injuries. Because of this the lunch break was brought forward and the re-run of race one started at 2 0’clock.
S.Brown took the holeshot in race one just heading v,Werven into turn one. Brown soon started to pull away from the Dutchman whilst J.Brown who had started in about fifth place was soon closing in on Foden / Cooper. By lap three he was past and chasing down v.Werven.
Behind the front three Foden was holding third ahead of Kinge / Pannell and Irish rider Gary Moulds / Lewis Gray. This was Gary’s first outing in the British championship after a long layoff with a leg injury.
After 8 laps J.Brown passed v.Werven but had to settle for second place, finishing nearly twenty seconds behind S.Brown. The leading Expert in this race was another Irish team of Neil Campbell / Ross Graham finishing in seventh place.
In the second leg S.Brown took the holeshot from J.Brown with v.Werven in third. For the first few laps J.Brown kept up with S.Brown but soon after the gap started to lengthen and by the end the gap had opened to 15 seconds. .
Foden had problems at the start and was right at the back in the early stages but he worked his way up to finally finish seventh. V.Werven put on another good show but finally dropped back finishing over thirty seconds behind the leader.
The final race of the day saw Foden make up for his poor start in race two taking the holeshot. Sadly for him this wasn’t what S.Brown had in mind and he was soon past and setting himself up for a clean sweep of races. Foden was also passed by J.Brown but finally came home in an excellent third place. V.Werven only managed one lap.
The finish of this race became a Brown family 1 -2 in the same way as they had done in the first two motos.
With just one round to go at Wakes Colne on 12th September S.Brown has a comfortable lead of 33 points over J.Brown whilst in the Experts class Bowers / Phelps are still leading.
Report and Photos by Chris Helm