2009

Super D – Tampines

Super D, the all mountain fun filled race get featured for the first time in Tampines Bike Park.

We’ve the chance to build it better and slightly more technical than what we can do in Kent Ridge some half a year ago.

The track will includes rollers, big berms (inslope turns), a slope style like 7ft tall WALL RIDE, simple drop off, DH rock garden, XC-like false flat and contour rides, and the ‘got to be skillful to ride fast’ ziggurat.

For the past 1 week, Jason, Peter and I with the help of 2 workers and occasional help from various other bikers, we managed to get half the wall ride up, 1 full berm ready, a 1 1/2ft drop off( with rollable options)  and a nice long rock garden that react nicely to those well chunky suspension fork.  The series of rollers is half done and should be ready by the end of the week.

We do suggest riders not to ‘test’ the wall ride at the moment as we are still securing some of the sturcture.

Rock Garden – building in progress

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the Making of a Carnival

We’re just got back into Tampines Bike Park just  after Christmas. With 2 months of time for trail work (Feb 14th 2009 being our internal dateline for GO!), it seems that some interesting lines can be placed into Tampines for this coming race.

First we’ve to address a few issues before building new one. The state of the trail is bad after the new contractor for this place trying to keep things sane by doing whatever without knowing what is it to manage a bike park. The wooden wonder is rotting away with various key bridges broken, the pond loop is disconnected as the new earthy plateau is place over the old BikeAsia100 race trail. Descender is a series of ruts (is a fall line truck road in the first place) and Mimosa is eating up the whole trail.

With a bit of luck and planning, National Parks committed some resources from their contractors to grass cut whatever needed so to ‘resurface’ all those hidden trails that everyone race on a good 9mths ago. Dirtraction with RMC came together with a proposal to get all these fix up before moving forward to build new trails.

With resources tight as ever and the economics timing as bad as the imploding white dwarf, support for these trail restoration effort is minimal. We’ve (Dirtraction and RMC) decided to place in our own resources, time and money to complement and get things into place before we loose all these trails to mother earth again.

The bridges is repaired, new connecting lines from the pond loop to the top of the kidney hill is made and most of the grass cutting  are done within this one month.

– the wooded wonder is totally ridable now.

pond loop is now connected to the new lower kidney climb

kidney loop is split and reused (600metres)

– totally new upper kidney descend and contour line ride is created (approx 800m)

With the addition of new these new trails in tampines, this coming Night Marathon race can be race on the ‘best of’ Tampines Bike Park.

Monster Mud Madness is probably gone and the good old finishing straight would no longer take the riders with the old Kids Singletrack taking over.

A point to note,

Upper Kidney and Lower Kidney still needed abit of surfacing work. the trail is freshly cut, ruts are big and random. we will make it a fun surface to ride on soon.

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