Foggy Petronas rider Steve Martin continues his exclusive Crash.net column in 2006 as he looks forward to his second season with the British based squad in the Corona Extra Superbike World Championship.
January is the time of year where I kick my training up a notch and find that I am always organising licenses, insurances and a lot of other jobs that go along with travelling and being away for long periods of time. I'm not the best paperwork person in the world so I'm pretty lucky to have Sandy to keep me moving along and getting through it.
I have been doing a lot of cycling and recently just about every ride I go on ends up with a massive headwind, good for strength but not too much fun. I have also been doing a lot of trials riding on my Beta trials bike, and when I'm not doing that I have dusted off the road bike and done a bit of road cruising as well. I have three road bikes, the first a 999 Ducati I ride when I want to feel like doing 100mph. The second is my 1982 model Mike Hailwood replica which makes 65mph feel like 100mph and then there's my old 1973 Triumph which makes 50 mph feel like 100mph. It's a toss up as to which one I ride but invariably they are not the most reliable bunch so I end up riding whatever is going at the time – usually just making it down to a local coffee shop.
We had our first test of the year at Phillip Island and it was a long test over four days with lots of variance in the weather conditions. I was very pleased with the progress the guys had made with the bike in the off season and it was reflected in our times which dropped considerably compared to last year's test under similar weather conditions. It was still a little hard to judge the competition as there were only Yamaha France and Corona Suzuki attending, but it felt good to finish second fastest. We seem to be in a much better position this year than at the same time last year.
