The pace was hot, PJ was showing us how it’s done with his perfected indoor racing technique which he has grown up with. I wasn’t far behind, about 1 tenth (on a 6 second lap) and Bigman wasn’t far behind me. It got more serious as the night went on but it all ended in tears the Bigman after he lost the front. He took a fair whack to the knee but that wasn’t a big deal. He’d cut the back of his leg so I went to hand him some tissue paper to wipe the blood and realised that he’d gashed it good and proper. It had really opened up and reminded me of the school days when we had to dissect things in biology! The gash was as long, as wide and probably deeper than my index finger! Not pretty! On his way down he caught his leg on the sprocket and that’s what did the damage and tore his skin clean open to the point where we could see his calf muscle! That was it for the night, Bigman went off to the doctors and came back with 14 stitches and a very camp pink bandage to cover it up which was pretty funny!
After the Charity event we had a day off before the Yamaha test. I had ordered a bicycle off one of my competitors, Josh Hayes, which he brought to the test and we put it together that day. It’s a very cool bike and I felt I needed it as I was spending a fair bit of time over there and had no form of training apart from running which is OK but after a couple of past crashes my right ankle doesn’t enjoy it much.
The two day Yamaha test went very well. We ran the AMA configuration track so I got a taste for what I will be racing on and I got up to speed with the place pretty quickly. It’s more like what I have been used to from my time in GPs as it was quite fast, flowing, pretty wide and safe. On day two I was on the pace with my Supersport bike, my fastest lap was good for second on the grid last year and consistently doing times definitely capable of a podium.
