In his latest update for Crash.net, rising 250GP star Chaz Davies reviews the Qatar Grand Prix at Losail - round two of the 2006 world championship - before which came minibikes, paint balling and showing Colin Edwards a 'special' foreign phrase book...
After the Spanish Grand Prix I flew back to London on the Monday and got back home to the Welsh borders on Monday evening. The week went fast before I had to be back in a plane and on the way to Qatar.
During the week I did a lot of Mini MX riding at our track at home. It’s a really good track now. My dad’s added bits too it here and there over the winter and now we’ve got it pretty good. There’s a couple of jumps, not too big though, big berms, little step overs, chicanes and all different types of corners. On Sundays we hold a sort of track day, where anybody who has a minibike is welcome to come and ride. As well as being good fun it’s also good for fitness. The track is pretty non-stop and you’ve got to stay sharp otherwise it will get painful!
Apart from a couple of days cycling and minibike riding I went paint-balling on the Saturday with a load a friends. We usually try to go a couple of times a year and it’s always really good fun. There were 16 of us and we were booked in at the same time as another group of 18 so they split us up and there was 17 aside. The setup is good because every game is different:
You have five games all in all and in the first one you have to defend an old, smashed-to-bits full sized helicopter and Landrover. One team starts at the other side of the forest and we started at the Helicopter. If you fail then the other team get points for putting these canisters, meant to be bombs, under the landrovers and getting their ‘General’ (the person nominated to wear a lumo yellow bib, not a good job!) into the helicopter. If you are shot and the paintball bursts then that’s it, you have to go out, game over. Anyway, we did pretty crap on the first couple of games and our tactics were all to pot.
