Nutt survives Donington Park chaos.

Marty Nutt and his Mark Johns/Nutttravel.com Honda had an eventful race weekend for the second round of the British Superbike Cup at Donington Park.

The weather and track conditions can only be described as treacherous due to heavy rain and hail. Nutt kept his head to finish third in race one and bag some important championship points. Unfortunately he had a DNF in race two which has relegated him to second in the Championship but he is only eight points off Malcolm Ashley the new Championship leader, and there is a lot of the season still to go and plenty of points up for grabs.

The weekend didn't start off too well with Nutt struggling in qualifying as he explains "We went the wrong way with settings basically and only got things right for the last twenty minutes of qualifying. I managed to find about one and a half to two seconds at the end of qualifying which is a massive step. I wasn't as far up the grid as I had wanted but we had went the right way so I was happy for the race."

Later that evening the team found a problem with the number one machine so they opted to run the spare bike on race day. "We don't really run the spare bike; it is only there for an absolute emergency. Morning warm up I got two laps in and it started misfiring and the clutch was slipping. The guys worked flat out all weekend, they never got a minute and the bike was great for the race," said Nutt.

Race one got under way with a five rider pile up at Redgate which started when Tommy Hill high sided his Virgin Mobile Yamaha and collected several on coming riders. "I got caught up in that first corner incident and I ended up falling off. It was a bit of a lottery, I was on the grass pretty early on and Jon Kirkham went down in front of me and I thought I was going to run over him, but I just managed to scrap past the side of him and I had to take off into the gravel," he explained "Then the front end of the bike got buried into the gravel and flicked me off. Saying that I managed to get it back up and got the thing going again and scraped a third place in the Privateers Cup so it was worth while."

At Cadwell Park last season Nutt lost his chain whilst going over the infamous Mountain section of the track and had to refit it and restart his bike which is exactly what he had to do at Donington. "I was amazed to get the thing started again because the bike has to be showing 50 mph on the speedo before it will start on the stand. So to actually push start it is quite an achievement, I just couldn't believe it I was in shock. It definitely paid off I'll have to thank the marshals at Redgate for that. I've had too much practice at this!" he grinned.

Race two didn't pan out quite as he had hoped but he did put in some impressive lap times that were on a par with Johnny Rea on the Red Bull Honda. "I intended just to go out and do a few laps softly, softly. If people wanted to go by me then no problem, I found my feet and got my head down and got the times going down real good. It was on the last lap going into Coppice doing nothing different to any other lap and the back end came round on me and I had to take to the gravel and unfortunately fell off."

Although it was disappointing not to finish race two Nutt is really looking forward to the high speed antics that will unfold next weekend at Thruxton. "Thruxton is good I think it has got what a lot of circuits are lacking - a bit of speed and a few real fast turns. Thruxton is just full of them, my motorbike is a very quick bike and I hope that will stand us in good stead," he concluded.