The most surprising news though, was when a handful of our - well, older - lads scooped the top three places in the British ACU 50cc Freetech national championship. It's been many years since South Africans have done so well in international… hang on! What's all that about our guys and the British 50cc championship? Well, the P-Factor is working its magic again on Mud Island.
In the 1970s a trio of young racers from Pinetown and Pietermaritzburg, Kork Ballington, Jon Ekerold and Alan North, sailed off to the UK and set the world alight, winning races in the UK and Europe and moving on to glorious Grand Prix careers that netted 39 GP wins and five world championships.
This year, the British motorcycle racing governing body, the ACU, initiated a 50cc championship - actually two - after many years of ignoring the tiddlers. There's a Classic class for bikes built before 1983, with skinny treaded tyres, no tyre warmers and so forth. The bikes can be modified but have to look like they would have back in the day.
Then there's the Freetech class where pretty-well anything goes apart from the 50cc limit. Multiple South African superbike champion, 2013 British Superstock 1000cc champion and regular Isle of Man TT competitor, Hudson Kennaugh, straddled the gap by competing on the original 50cc bike he raced in South Africa in the early '90s, changing the wheel sizes and fitting racing slicks. He won the Freetech championship, with fellow South Africans Mark Bainbridge and Shane Norval second and third.
Kennaugh and Norval, a South African 250cc GP champion, twice runner up in the British 250cc GP championship and GP racer from 1998 to 2000 hail from Pinetown and Maritzburg respectively. Bainbridge, who hails from Springs, never raced in SA but started with some success in the UK in 2009 when already in his 30s.
Another Pinetown character, Scott Park (43) , who's earned local fame here and in the UK for his daredevil antics on and off the track, contested half the season on a Classic and hopes to mount a serious attack on that championship next year.
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