Thanx everyone for your support.

It really gets to me that people would blame the fitness of people over 50. Or the machine preparation since it was a classic.

We were as professional in our approach to the manx as any of the top modern people, and if you look at the quality of the riders you have to beat to win the classic races (chris palmer etc) you can see why we took our racing seriously. And believe me we were there to win both races.

Also i'd like to add that my father was a racing man not a practice man so he wouldn't have been pushing it on that practice, we will never know wot caught him out, but anyone who watched him at the pre-tt and manx will know how steady he was in practices from the fact the despite his good podium record we never had a front row start at billown, and last year his fastest lap in manx practice was 98mph but he did 103mph in the race.