In the first of his exclusive columns for Crash.net, Isilon MSS Discovery Kawasaki's Michael Rutter talks about how a difficult weekend turned out well, with two top-ten finishes...
Hi guys,
I'm glad to get my first race weekend over and with a couple of reasonable results. We are in at the deep end with a new bike and new team but is it all starting to come together.
We had technical problems over the weekend and my mechanics had to work around the clock to get them ironed out. Of course the mechanical gremlins kicked in during qualifying – typical! We had an electrical issue with the quickshifter and a gearbox problem with the other bike, which restricted us a fair bit. I didn't even get to do a lap in anger on my qualifying tyre, which was a little disappointing ending up fifteenth. Even with the problems we were not too far off on race tyres and our race set-up was pretty good.
As it turned out a bad practice worked out as a good race. We had a tenth in the first race which we were really happy with and a seventh in the second one which we were more than happy with. If someone had said “You'll finish seventh” at the beginning of the weekend I'd have laughed at them. It is a new team, new bike, new everything so I'm very pleased at how it all panned out.
I got away well in race one and moved from twelfth to tenth at the flag. In race two, I got up to ninth, before the Pace Car was deployed. As the Pace Car entered the pits Cal Crutchlow ahead of me had a massive slide which meant I was baulked in Clearways and Karl Harris came past me, so it could so easily been a sixth position. I'm chuffed really as I'm three points ahead of reigning champion Ryuichi Kiyonari!
