The MiniSBK season opened at Shannonville in May, on a weekend cold enough that the wind was the main thing anyone talked about between sessions.
Cohen won his class. Crosby finished second in his. Those are the two lines that will end up in a results sheet somewhere, and they are both worth having, but neither is the thing I took home from the weekend.
What I took home was Abel on the Ohvale. He had upgraded to it at Brechin in April and then immediately had it taken away from him for the race, because it rained and he had one day on the bike. Shannonville was the first time anyone got to watch him actually ride it in anger.
There is a particular problem with being the parent at a race weekend, which is that you are almost never in the right place. You are in the paddock when they are on track, or you are holding a stopwatch and looking at a phone instead of at your kid. A good chunk of what I know about how my sons ride, I know secondhand, from other people's photographs. Several of the pictures from this weekend came from friends at the track who happened to be pointing a camera the right way at the right moment. That is not a complaint. It is just how it works, and it is one of the quieter arguments for the paddock being what it is.
Cohen winning his class matters for a reason that is not obvious from the result. He is on the 190 this year, which is a substantially different motorcycle from what he learned on, and in May he was still early in figuring it out. A win at that stage is not proof that he has it sorted. It is evidence that the work between the rounds is landing, which is the only thing you can really ask for in the first race of a season.
Crosby's second is the same story in miniature. He is the youngest of the three and races the smallest bikes, and he is the one who is most obviously racing rather than riding — he wants the position, not the lap time. That will cause him trouble eventually. In May it got him onto the box.