2018

Skeer Happy inside Kawasaki Supersport top 10

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Team PR

Last weekend was Round 4 of the Yamaha Motor Finance Australian Superbikes Championship presented by Motul Pirelli (ASBK) held at the awesome Hidden Valley Raceway in Darwin. As always, the weather up there was warm but not too hot. We had the most successful weekend so far on the 600cc in ASBK. I flew in 1am Thursday morning then was on track that afternoon at 3pm.

On Thursday I spent most of the day learning the track and adapting my lines to suit the 600 compared to the Moto3 that I raced last year. The 1-hour long session was great to do that, and it set us up well for the three sessions on Friday.

Friday was made up of three 30-minute sessions that we used to try and find a set up on the bike. We struggled Friday to find a set up that I was going to be comfortable to race with. The bike was running wide on the exit of the corners, so we made changes to fix that, but it then caused something else to happen and so on. We ended up going into Saturday qualifying with some front-end problems.

With new tyres on for round 1 of qualifying and the track being cooler in the morning I knew I would go fast. I had a good tow for the first 6 laps, so I knew I would be able to push and get a slip stream. For the first 6 laps I was lapping consistently quicker then Friday practise finishing up with a 1.10.525 beating my time from Friday practise by .897. This put me 11^th on the grid for both races on Sunday. There was a second qualifying in the afternoon on Saturday but the track was 50 degrees, so we knew it would be very hard to go any faster as the tyres would slide around a lot more. We used this last qualifying to try and better our setup. We made a lot of adjustments and found a set up that would work with the track and tyres.

Sunday morning started with a 5-minute warm up that we used purely as a warm up. There were two 14 lap races on Sunday and two top ten finishes in both really helped with the championship standings. In race 1 I got a really good start moving from 11^th to 4^th into turn 1. I then had a rider come around the outside of me clipping my boot and taking my foot off the peg and running my wide which cause me to lose my run up the hill. Two more riders got pass because of that. As I got such a good start I was in with riders that were 1 second a lap faster than me so I had a few pass me. I was able to keep some behind me though. There was a couple of riders that crashed out due to the hot conditions and I was able to hold two other riders off until the last where on the fourth to last corner he made a move on me and pushed me wide and I lost a lot of time. Slip streaming down the straight brought me to 0.030 behind him over the finish line. I finished in a strong 9^th.

Race two was very similar getting a good start and dropping back three places on the first lap to faster riders. I was able to stay in front of a group of riders for six laps. I got ran wide on lap six and lost two positions. I also lost a couple of seconds to the rider in front of me. I was pushing all race to try and catch up and lapping consistently faster than the rider in front of me meant that on the last three laps I started to catch him fast and finished only 0.254 behind in 8^th.

Overall, I finished 6^th for the weekend and moved up to 8^th in the championship. Even though I finished no higher than 8^th it goes to show how consistency pays off in the end. Even though the bike wasn’t setup perfect it was pretty close. A massive thanks to the team as always Dad and Fly the mechanic who drove 6,900km up and back. Also, a big thanks to Hally for setting the bike up for me. If I didn’t have the amazing sponsors that I have then this would not be possible:

Penrite Oils

Barry Francis Motorcycles

Suzuki Motorcycles Australia

Stef’s Transport Millicent

Nitron Racing Shocks

Suspensions R Us

Ron Angel Classic Racing

Trident tyre centre

Baker Group

Gunia Plant Hire

Australian Technical Rubber

Sew Unique