"At last!"

the relieved cry goes up from the triumvirate RF readership, "a post that doesn't go into tedious detail about bike chain widths".

Dom is getting married in August, and as such we were legally obliged to engage in typically male activities such as driving too fast and drinking too much. (The '60s favourite - driving too fast while drinking too much - has sadly been eclipsed by less lethal stag diversions.)

After crawling through the treacly flow of T in the Park traffic, Dave and I finally met up with the rest of the herd in Culross for some superior pub grub around 1 pm. Fed and watered, we charged heedlessly off into the Fife countryside, eventually finding the day's entertainment through a combination of dogged persistence and blind luck.

The setup was that we were driving Rage buggies around a dusty, kinked oval track with a vertiginous climb and subsequent drop at one side, and a bumpy, twisty flat section on the other. We didn't directly race each other but instead had 3-lap practice heats to get the hang of things and then a timed 3-lap session to decide the final order.

While waiting to start, we watched the last few laps of the preceding group and grumbled about how slow it looked.

How wrong we were. The karts handled like a scaled-up version of your typical radio-controlled buggy: they skipped and bounced across the berms and kickers, and the suspension travel that looked comically over-compensatory at rest was about only thing that kept one's spine from compressing.

The crowning horror of the circuit was the downhill section on which the gradient kept increasing all the way to the bottom: the only way to tackle it was to point the kart in roughly the right direction, plant the throttle and hope. The suspension dropped as the kart steadily lightened and then compressed with a thump, smacking off the bump stops over the mini-jump about two thirds of the way down; with the kart squirming around underneath you (and while wondering in a dazed sort of way how it was that it hadn't shaken itself to pieces), you wrenched the wheel to the left and slithered around the sweeping left hander. Utter, exhilarating genius.

Dave and Steve have some photos of the day but the only one you really need to see is Dom's disappointment as I squirt my victory juice in his face :) See, some people would have let the stag win. I, on the other hand, am a closet sociopath. The voices tell me to win.

Next up: boozy mentalness in which we paint the town metal.