My start in the race was another good one but the first lap was not as good as the previous races. I was on the outside for the second corner and got pushed out wide and lost a couple of places.
In the first few laps I had to pass Jenkner, Smrz and Ballerini and then caught up Corsi who took half a lap to pass but then by this point Guintoli, Debon and Sekiguchi were 400metres ahead. I pressed on hard as soon as I caught and passed Corsi so he didn’t have a chance to come back at me down the straight because he is a real pain to pass so you have to make the most of the opportunity when it comes.
I made use of the tight part of the circuit to get away from him so I had a decent gap for when it came to the straight. Each lap my I could see the gap on my pit board going up to Corsi and co behind me from 0.5 to 4 seconds.
At one point I did start to come back on the Guintoli group in front but without being with them and in their slip stream it was hard work making up time so they had a couple of tenths on me per lap in the end. I was 12th up until the last lap and then got bumped up to 11th when Sekiguchi retired.
All in all is wasn’t a bad race. The chassis was a battle all weekend and I got 5 points in the end so I was reasonably happy. Of course last year was much better but even if I’d have done the same race time as last year in the race this year it would have still been 11th! That just shows the level of the 250 this year, 6th last year is 11th this year!
On Sunday night there was a party in one of the bars on the Island and Aoyama came up to me and said he was right behind me when I hit the seagull. He said it was unbelievable from behind, big mess!
Turkey
We moved on from Australia on Monday with a long flight to Istanbul. It was 7 hours to Singapore from Melbourne, then 1 hour waiting and then almost 8 hours from Singapore to Dubai and then an 8 hour stop over there and then finally a 4 hour flight to Istanbul. My Dad met us in Istanbul. He has been at home for the last 5 weeks and decided he wanted to come out to the last flyaway.
