There riders, a guy called Michael Barnes and Geoff May, have been pulling in decent results all year and finished second and third in the Supersport Championship so it shows that the tyres must be coming pretty good. At about 1pm there were the two SBK heats and then straight after was my FX race. I was a bit worried because I had hardly done any practice starts on the ‘05 bike and the ones that I had done were absolutely crap! The problem is that you're not allowed to stop on the track at the end of a session in the AMA so it was difficult to practice them.
I was ninth on the FX grid and, as I predicted, I made a right hash of the start! It’s a good job I could go deeper on the brakes than most off the end of the back straight so I could pull back whatever positions I had lost! I passed three riders into that corner on the first lap and then picked off two more by the time I passed the start/finish line and was tenth at the end of lap one.
On lap two I passed another three riders, two of them on the brakes at the end of the back straight, and then had a bit of a gap to catch a guy called Ryan Andrews. I caught him in a few laps and then I expected to be able to break him within a lap. I was wrong. He just stuck to the back of me, along with a guy called Danny Eslick and just sat on me for a few laps. Andrews’s bike was a full blown FX bike and an absolute rocket! Mine and Eslick’s bike were quite similar and I think once I passed him I showed some pace and then he seemed to really pick it up.
