In the latest of his exclusive columns for Crash.net, Stobart Honda’s Michael Laverty talks about his plans for next year….
Hi guys,
Well I got to go back home to Northern Ireland for the Ulster Grand Prix. Ian Lougher was riding one of the Stobart machines and put it on the podium for the second superbike race of the day. So it was a good day out and a bit different, I like to come and watch as a punter rather than the pressure of racing.
Croft didn’t go too bad especially in the second race with all the rain. At the end of the race I slipped down to seventh place. At one stage I thought I was going to grab fifth when I caught Kiyonari but I started to spin up quite a bit and it let Rutter get back passed me so he got sixth and I got seventh. It wasn’t too bad; the first race was a bit of a nightmare for me as we had changed the gear box after qualifying and didn’t get to try it in warm up so I went straight into the first race with a lot of changes. Actually we changed more than just the gearing, we changed quite a few things and I struggled a lot to get anywhere near my times from free practice and qualifying. I had a poor result finishing in thirteenth and I knew that whatever the weather did I could do better than that just by making some changes to the bike.
It was a decent result in the second race, but a bit of a frustrating weekend because we had been testing stuff on Friday and it took all three of the free practices to get the bike back to as good as we had it at the test there the month before the race. In qualifying I did get it together and did some pretty good times on race rubber and I looked ok for the weekend. It has been like that lately just hasn’t gone according to plan. I’ll just keep my chin up and keep plugging away and hopefully we can turn it around at Cadwell.
