"The adjustments that had been made to the clutch were definitely an improvement though. I now felt like I could control the clutch rather than it being an all or nothing feeling. Both of my starts were pretty good at 3.2 and 3.3 seconds from 0-100kph. In the previous races my starts had been about 3.8 - 4.0 seconds which is about as good as I could get. It doesn’t sound like that much of a difference in time but by the time we’re at the first corner we’re doing about 200kph and you lose all the momentum on the run down off the grid and a lot of places with it!
"For Saturday my chassis mechanic made a few small adjustments to the front of my bike which made it quite a bit better in the faster corners but a bit more unstable on the brakes, but sometimes you have to sacrifice one thing to make another thing better and I definitely thought it was worth the change.
"I was 15th in the morning but the weather for the afternoon was looking very 50/50. Within 2 laps of our final qualifying session it started to rain slightly. On the first part of the circuit it was dry and then in the middle of the circuit it was raining enough to make the circuit slightly damp and then for the last half of the lap it was bone dry.
"Nobody really knew quite how much they could push on the damp part of the track so only Ant West improved as he went out very quickly and took a few risks early on. For the last 8 minutes it looked like it was starting to dry again so I went back out but within a lap the rain had started again. So, I was 18th on the grid from Friday’s time but fairly confidant after looking at the time sheets because I saw that a lot of the riders ahead of me on the grid had just done 1 brain out lap and looked like they would struggle to put any consistent times together, whereas I knew I could do pretty consistent times.
