Christian Iddon

Well, my last column was all about just how I'm going to be the most prepared I could ever be for the season ahead.

As it goes, I was quite incredibly underprepared for being prepared.

I'd done the hard part. Bought the bike, got some tyres, and had it shipped to Spain, but I underestimated how hard doing a trackday 'on your own' actually is after always having all my bike stuff done for me.

We did have the opportunity to have a mechanic for whom we'd split the cost between myself, Ben, and his sponsor (our trackday travelling threesome), but that word 'cost' really put me off the idea - and in any case, I've spent ages watching mechanics twiddle spanners and they make it look pretty simple... so I kindly declined.

That was my first error. The second was to mute our trackday group chat (I do it to all my group chats) and I totally missed the whole chat about tools and what we need to actually function on our own. I knew we didn't need too many tools as I didn't plan to do too much work anyway, and I've always been allergic to spanners, but I seriously underestimated just how few tools we would have.

As the van was unpacked and placed in the garage, I began to wonder where the toolbox actually was.... and as the back of the van was finally emptied, I wondered if we even had a toolbox at all.

It turned out we didn't, and our version of a toolbox was a rolled-up towel housing very little indeed. Thankfully, the team sent us with the serious stuff, such as a torque bar thing and a mahoosive nut for the back wheel, but aside from that, we didn't have much at all.