I had the best weekend of my life this weekend, it was brilliant!
On Friday test day, I had 2 30 minute practice sessions, where as with the MRO championship on the Aprilias you get 5 or 6 15 minute practice sessions.
In the 1st session I was just getting to know the bike a bit better again and also learning the track as well because I had only done the Indy circuit before, I thought the track was great! I really liked the last corner the way you flew round it compared to when you go around it on the Indy circuit.
In the 2nd session I was starting to get faster and knocked a few seconds off my time and was starting to get the hang of the track a bit better. The track conditions were very confusing that weekend as the weather was constantly changing from bright sun shine to misty, cold miserable rain.
Saturday morning was qualifying day, whereas at MRO you have 1 15minute qualifying session with the Aprilias and at british you get 2 30minute qualifying sessions which makes it easier to have a chance to stick a few good laps in. I was running ok considering I had never done the british championship before, nor the GP circuit and had hardly any practice on my GP bike before. I knocked a couple of seconds off after my two qualifying sessions and qualified overall in 28th place out of a full grid of 40 riders.
The next day was Sunday, race day. The weather was yet again very confusing as Dad, Shawn Atkine my coach, Alan and I didn’t know which tyres to put on because the weather was very changable, so if it dried out and I had wet tires on then basically I wouldn’t finish the race because there would be nothing left of the tyres as they are so soft and grippy, if it chucked it down with rain and I had choseen dry tyres then I would just have to tip toe around and hope for the best.
Luckily, the heavens opened as I was leaving the race truck on my bike to line up for the race so obviously we chose wet tyres. When completing our warm up lap the heavens really did open up and there wasn’t just rain but hail stones as well! The race had a 40 minute delay because parts of the track were waterlogged and had to be sorted out, also whilst this was happening everyone was freezing there butts off waiting and making sure that the temperature of their bike was at the right degrees otherwise if you got it too low or too high there is a good chance that your engine will seize and you won’t finish the race or worse, being catapulted through the sky if you don’t pull the clutch in in time.
The race was shortend from 15 laps to 8 because of the delay… The race was finally underway and I got a great start and made up a fair few places, for the first couple of laps I just tip toed around the track and checking everything out while my tyres got a chance to warm up a bit, after those couple of laps I started to get the hang of things and found myself with a group of about 4 or 5 maybe 6 riders and there were a few scares but I didn’t let it phase me, I was starting to get a move on after a while and made up a huge number places where in time I passed two riders going into the last corner and I think the front wheel of one even clipped my rear as I squeezed through, I then set myself a target of catching up the next bunch of 5 or 6 riders as I was on my own and didn’t want to make any mistakes, because of this, I came very close to catching and passing this bunch of riders and in fact I lost by 200 hundreds of a second to the person of the back of the bunch, as I had just caught him.
I thought I did ok in the race but nothing spectacular and was guessing I had finished in about 16th place maybe just 15th, as I pulled into the pitlane and came to a stand still I saw my Dad and Shaun come leaping towards me in tears… I didn’t know why they were so happy and overcome with emotion but then a second later I found out I had just finished in 11th place in my debut race in the British GP 125 championship, pretty good for my debut ride I thought.
Tags: racing, circuit, Aprillia, motorcycle, bmcrc
