In the latest of his exclusive columns for Crash.net, Stobart Honda’s Michael Laverty tells us about the bad weather that saw his home round cancelled….
Hi guys,
I know Ireland has a reputation for being wet but this weekend has just been ridiculous! I’ve been at Mondello Park before for Supermoto races and it has been weather like this weekend, the place just floods, so it was the only safe decision they could have made. We had a fifteen minute warm up session and the conditions weren’t too bad but it just kept on raining since, the safety issue is why they’ve had to call it. Disappointing really because in the wet I was going quick, I finished up fourth at the end of the session and things were going good and getting better every session in the dry. So it was a bit disappointing that it was called off, I would have liked to race whatever the conditions but safety comes first at the end of the day.
There were quite a few crashes in the wet warm up that we had, I saw both the Rizla Suzuki’s crash in front of me. I saw James Haydon getting high sided and then Shakey just lost the front and went down in front of me. It was quite slippery; I just had to be very soft with the brakes and was just riding cautious. If the rain had relented we could have raced ok as the track is not overly slippy in the wet, but the rain just didn’t give up.
Up until the weather took over we were going pretty good, we took a few sessions to get a good setting. Every circuit we go to it takes a bit of work, every session I was getting faster and faster. On race tyres I wasn’t that far off it, when we put the qualifiers in I only got a few tenths as I kept running wide on the corners when I had the extra grip. I didn’t get a major lap time in but it kept me on the second row of the grid which was all I wanted, I’m good at starts, so if I’m on the first two rows I’m happy.
