In his latest of his exclusive Crash.net columns, Chaz Davies explains his decision to leave motorcycle grand prix racing, after five seasons, and move to the AMA Formula Xtreme and Supersport championships for 2007...
Hello everybody! Long time no speak... I seem to have said that a lot in my reports this year. I should have done a report after Valencia but I thought I’d save it until I had something positive to write about. I think that comment is enough to sum up the Valencia weekend but I will elaborate, a bit!
Just before I talk about Valencia I’ll fill you in on my trip that I did the week before the GP in a small place called Beas De Seguras, which is more or less in central Spain. I did a paramotoring course which was awesome fun. My dad used to be into it and actually helped build the first ever paramotor 20 years ago, along with a guy who now builds the best wings available for the Paramotors called Mike Campbell-Jones. Mike now runs a company called Paramania that specialise in trick wings. Have a look on
www.flyparamania.com if you want to find out a bit more and see some videos of what it‘s all about.
So, I learnt how to Paramotor in the week leading up to Valencia. I haven’t had to cram in that much information in one week since I was a school a few years ago, but it was all important and essential if you want to go paramotor safely. It’s very important to know exactly how wind and weather work and most importantly, when it is not safe to fly.
After five days of theory and a couple of tandem flights it was time to go solo and boy was it a rush! I was proper rigid for the first couple of minutes but then started to settle down and chill out a bit. Mike was instructing me over the radio and giving me orders to get me comfortable with all the wing controls. The one bit that I wasn’t looking forward to was the landing and to make it worse, we lost radio communication a couple of minutes before I was supposed to land.
