Justwin Racing's Justin Reid placed third in the first race at FatCats

England (8/10/2012) - Justin Reid and the Justwin Racing crew made the trip to the sandy circuit of FatCats just outside Doncaster last weekend to take part in round two of the British Quad Championship and came away with mixed emotions.

With the weather being very unkind for the last two months, Justin hadn't raced for some time and this showed in qualifying as Justin was almost five seconds down on 1.45 in tenth, though the Justwin team know that Justin's strengths come towards the end of a long race when others tire. Justin rounded the corner in about seventh place and was lucky not to get caught in a six quad pile-up down the back straight, in which luckily no one was hurt.

Justin was into fourth behind Holmes and teammate Dean Colhoun and Carl Bunce by the end of lap three, until a hard charging Connor Smith caught and passed him two laps later. At the half way stage and with Holmes still leading, Colhoun landed awkwardly on a large tabletop, tweaked his wrist and gradually slipped back into the pack as Smith cartwheeled his KTM down the track handing third place to Justin and it looked like the race was settled. Justin was quickly reeling in Bunce and looked sure to pass when things went a bit wrong as a small component holding the seat on Justin's machine failed and the seat became detached making it difficult to maintain second position to the end of the race.

With six laps to go, without a seat, Bunce was able to pull away from Justin who concentrated on maintaining the gap to fourth place. Bunce ironically lost his seat with two laps to go but hung on for second, with Justin a valiant third and the re-mounted Smith fourth, with Justin's old adversary, John Mitchell, making a one off come back to the championship, fifth.

The skies were darkening as the thirty three starters lined up for race two where Holmes got another holeshot with Justin about fifth, but with just six laps completed and with Justin up to fourth, Lindsay Duke had a big crash just as the thunder and lightning arrived and the race had to be stopped.

With conditions as they were and with most of the track marshals running for cover it was impossible to restart the race so it was abandoned.

Justin said after, "I'm livid that we have come all this way and waited around all day for the meeting to be ended prematurely like this. The program was way too optimistic today and as a result one of the main events had to be cancelled - it just doesn't make sense to me. It was never going to be easy coming back after such a long lay off to a deep sand track but I'm happy with the way I rode today.

Qualifying didn't go according to plan as I had a problem with my chain and missed the opportunity to set a good time - it wasn't so much of an issue though as the start is fairly even here. The seat coming off has never happened to me before - I hung in with Carl for a lap after it came off but it became apparent that I wasn't going to be able to maintain that effort for 6 laps. After that I just concentrated on staying in front of 4th as I had about a 10second gap. I could actually see the seat laying at the side every lap and actually thought about stopping to put it back on!"

Race one results: 1 Paul Holmes, 2 Carl Bunce, 3 Justin Reid (Justwin Racing), 4 Conner Smith, 5 John Mitchell, 6 Oliver Sansom, 7 Sheldon Seal, 8 Richard Tordoff, 9 Luke Cooper, 10 Paul Broomhead.