There was nothing much to achieve by pushing too hard in the afternoon but I still did, as I felt I had a bit of a point to prove and wanted to show what I could have done if I had not had the throttle-body problem in the morning. I managed to bounce back from the problems of the morning though to come 18th in the afternoon free practice.
On race day, I was fighting for my first championship point before a gearbox problem on the last few laps of the first race ended that challenge and caused me to drop to 17th. Then in race two I had problems with the gear position sensor, but got my head down and still managed to lap a second faster on average and reduced the gap to race two’s winner Kagayama, by 20 seconds to finish in 21st place. Whilst they are not race positions I’m happy with, it was my best race day on the FP1 to date this season which was one positive to take from that weekend, as was the fact that I made more progress at Brno than any other circuit so far this year.
That gave me a lot of confidence going into the following round at
Brands Hatch, where I was aiming for Superpole and to score some points, particularly with it being my home round and also a track I know well. My times in British Supersport last season were only 1.5 seconds off Haga’s best superbike lap there, so I knew if I could repeat those times I could probably be challenging for good points.
In qualifying practice on the Friday I was only three thousandths of a second off Steve’s time which wasn’t bad at all considering I was hindered by niggling problems throughout the day.
But I also felt I had to re-learn Brands Hatch for riding a superbike as it felt like I constantly had to fight the bike as I discovered bumps on the track that I never knew existed.
My qualifying efforts were then further hampered on Saturday by technical issues, which meant I didn’t really have enough time on track. I also had to qualify on my number two bike, which I wasn’t as comfortable with and couldn’t get into a rhythm, so ended up 24th on the grid.
