We’re delighted that 2 of our sponsored riders have qualified for the BD Petplan Championships at Hartpury in April. Louisa tells the eventful story of her and Arnie’s qualification.
“Arnie and I are off to Hartpury for the Winter Championships in April! Whoop, whoop! We are so excited! Last month we went off to Bicton Arena Area Festival Final for the Inter 1 and PSG which we had qualified for all the way back in May. It’s been a bit of a wait but we had finally got there – well just!
We decided to go to Bicton the day before as my Inter 1 test was at 8.08am! I finished work at lunchtime on the Friday and everything was actually all going to time for once! Arnie was loaded onto the lorry, feed and bedding packed, ramp shut and in we climbed. It was when I tried to start the lorry that we realised we weren’t going anywhere soon as when I turned the key the lorry was dead! It didn’t even attempt to start, nothing! I was gutted, as we had only driven it the previous week for 200 miles so we had no idea how the batteries were so gone. Anyway, mum was keen for us to get there so we rang breakdown and in the mean time we tried using a friend’s lorry to jump start ours. It was so dead that we couldn’t even jump it! Breakdown was taking ages and by this point we had waited two hours and storm Brian was starting to hit and evening was coming. By 6.30pm the lorry had finally started and we knew we could get to Bicton – but would we get home!
We arrived at Bicton in the dark and sorted Arnie out for the night; luckily I had half plaited him earlier whilst waiting for breakdown so that was one less thing to do in the morning. The next morning I was on before dawn had even broken and headed down to the warm up. Arnie was amazing and despite storm Brian being at its worse and flower pots falling over everywhere, Arnie produced a lovely test to get 64.32% to come 2nd and qualify! It wasn’t a long break until our PSG test so Arnie had a little rest and then off we went for the PSG. He did a lovely test but we did unfortunately make a couple of silly errors in our changes. We split the judges with one giving us over 69%, one on 67% but the other on 63%! Shows how subjective our sport is and unfortunately this one low score stopped us qualifying as we finished 3rd on 66.49% – just 3 marks from 2nd! Fingers crossed for a wild card! We had a great time but now to buy two new lorry batteries!!”
