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Round 1
26/28 March 2004
Silverstone
I can't quite believe how quick the season has come round again!
Moving into the British Supersport Championship is a massive leap from the R6 Cup and I knew I had to work so much harder at Silverstone. Pre-season testing has been going really well and I've felt really comfortable on the bike, but as you can imagine with the season starting this weekend the nerves suddenly kicked in!
Friday's testing went well considering the poor weather conditions in the morning. It cleared up in the afternoon, which allowed me to end the session with the third fastest time.
We had two qualifying sessions on Saturday. The weather conditions for the first session were horrible, damp and very greasy, and I finished the session in twentieth place. It comforted me to know that even Karl Harris was seventeenth! The weather was better in the afternoon which allowed me to do a race simulation to test my tyres. The plan was to test the tyre, then come in to the pits to put a softer tyre on and go out again and put in a fast lap. This strategy worked and put me on the second row of the grid in sixth place.
I was very nervous for the race and was glad when it got underway. I was fourth on the first lap and I actually moved into third at one point. I dropped back to fifth and then to sixth but was still holding my own by lap eight. On lap ten I made a bit of a mistake and moved back to seventh where I stayed comfortably for the rest of the race with the eighth place rider over ten seconds behind. I was pleased that I'd beaten a lot of the front-runners from last year and finished a strong seventh at the first round.
Qualifying sixth and finishing seventh in my first British Supersport race was such an achievement for me and for the whole Northpoint Ekerold team.
All weekend I had been working hard with my Crew Chief Pete Jennings and the three Bridgestone tyre technicians - one was British and the other two who had flown all the way from Japan to be there for the weekend. The two aims for the weekend were to get on the front two rows in qualifying, and secondly to chose a tyre for the race that we were going to be happy with. We successfully managed both of these things and everyone was really happy with the progress I had made in developing the Bridgestone tyres.
British Supersport is known as one of the hardest classes in the world and it is a great achievement for me to do so well this early on. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the Northpoint Ekerold team, my personal sponsors KD Plant ( Lincoln ) and Joanna Fray, and everyone who has helped me so far this season.
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