Becketts Farm = 17.72 :-) :-)

Well we very nervously went up to Beckett's Farm as we had been left to fly solo without our team captain! We had 2 teams in, the Ballistics and Missiles as without Bobbie and Louise basically the whole Rockets team was missing!

Missiles ran Saturday and were Tyne, Sky, Chelsey, Fraggle and Guiness. Had a bit of a nightmare start to the day when the lights decided they weren't going to work and we had to go with hand timing! The weather was pretty rubbish but this helped a couple of our dogs who suffer with the heat. I ran Chelsey the Lab, god she's a very strong dog! The four big dogs ran a lot better than they had been previously but we had to be a bit careful on changes with it being judged by eye and Guiness really wasn't up for running, she was on a bit of a go slow. They managed a best time of 27.something and finished last but they had some closer racing than they've had recently and noone messed about or ran out so atleast that was an improvement :-s!

Saturday evening we had a few drinks to celebrate my birthday, I got horrendously drunk and was just chatting nonsense but apparently I was quite entertaining so atleast I was useful! Luckily I'm still just about young enough not to suffer from bad hangovers so although I didn't quite make it to ring party 1st thing in the morning I was fine by the time Div 1 was due to start!

Ballistics were 4th seed in Division 1, we were missing Rosie but still had a strong team of Diefer, Lacy, Asher, Smartie and Bunty. We knew it was going to be an exciting division with Bassetts, Flyers and Moltens all pushing for times. 1st race was against molten meteors, we went with what we thought would be our fastest combo of Diefer, Lacy, Asher and Bunty. We got a light on the 1st leg and then 2nd leg we won with 17.84secs! We then lost a leg as they did an 18.02 and we were very slightly behind, next leg we won with another sub 18 but unfortunately on the last leg we got a light! Next race was against Flyers, we went with Smartie instead of Lacy. We were really winding our dogs up as we have a friendly rivalry with the Flyers and although they were much faster than us they got 3 lights in a row so we won with a best time of 17.81secs!! We then watched as Flyers went in and broke the 17sec barrier by doing 16.91secs!! Go Flyers! Our next race was against Bassetts who we knew we couldn't beat on speed so we rested Asher, we did take a leg off them when they got a light so all in all we were pleased with the morning racing. 1st race in the afternoon was against northants falcons who had done a 17.88secs in the morning so we knew it would be very close. 1st leg we both got lights, luckily i have an instant rerun on Asher so we won that 1, the next 2 legs we were very slightly behind so swapped Lacy for Smartie and managed to win the race! Last race was against molten magnets, we didn't think we could beat them on speed so decided to rest Diefer however we were only just behind them so after 2 legs we swapped diefer back in and raced a 17.72secs winning the leg and getting our fastest EVER time! Last leg we couldn't quite repeat that speed but it was still really close and we only just lost. Came out of the ring and got ourselves in position ready to watch the British Record broken, go Bassetts... 16.70secs and I'm sure they've still got more to give, it was amazing to watch! We managed to come 3rd with some of the best racing I've taken part in for ages!

Think we've learnt from the weekend that Asher should really go 2nd, he used to be a bit scared of changeovers with big dogs but he's fine now and it does help him giving us that lead early on. Angie with Bunty also struggles to change with him as she literally has to let go of Bunty as he's coming off the box so she found it much easier changing to Smartie resulting in Bunty running much better times. And well Smartie, she was on fire, must of known she was up in the big league so her promotion has remained for Chilterns this weekend. Will be interesting to see what we can do!