Foggy Petronas rider Steve Martin, a native to Australia, wanted to do well in front of his home crowd at Phillip Island's round of World Superbikes on 3rd April.
Managing to stick his FP-1 in second spot on the grid, luck was to dish out a cruel outcome to the races...
It's April now and, as I predicted in my last column, March was bloody busy - and it's already clear that our testing is really starting to pay off.
Straight away after the last column Sandra and I headed down to Valencia for the second World Superbike pre-season test - even though we had already had our first race in Qatar! It was a great relief to get to Valencia to test some new parts and to get onto a circuit where the team knew the bike well. I know a lot of people from the press were talking doom after Qatar but I knew the bike would perform well on certain circuits and knew Valencia would be one of them.
We tested new cooling systems, a slightly different engine with a changed balance shaft and Gary tested a new longer swing arm. All in all the test went really well and I was doing some really good times on race tyres, which I hope will put us in a good position for the race there later this month. I was happy at the end of the two days to be in the top seven for most of the weekend only to drop back a little when the other guys put the qualifying tyres in.
The Monday morning after the test we had to get up at 4.30 am to catch a flight from Valencia to Milan to Rome to Dubai to Melbourne! What a flight! It would have to be equal to the longest trip I've ever been on. It took us about 40 hours give or take a few minutes and I was shattered when I arrived. To top it off they lost our bag and the guy behind me sounded like he had some sort of bird flu! Whatever it was he gave it to me and I ended up in bed for a week.
