Three wins and a second. Debuts don’t get much better than that.
Well I’ve got to give it to Tim, my twin brother; he might not be as good-looking as me, but he has been doing a bloody good job of flying the flag for us in the British Supersport Championship while I have been nursing my shoulder back to full fitness. He put in some strong performances at the first two rounds, and I’ll admit I was pretty proud of him (don’t tell him though, for Christ’s sake), but it was at Oulton Park (while I was busy working on the farm) that he really showed them what he can do. He might not have finished either of the races but I’m pretty sure that if he hadn’t popped an engine in race one he would have bagged a handful of points, and as far as race two goes, well I know he threw it down the road (he probably got all excited when he saw P4 on his pit-board, bless-him) but at least he was trying. Joking aside, even though he crashed out it was great to see him really hanging the bag out and trying his nuts off to get as close to the front as possible.
Anyway, enough about Tim, he’s had far too much limelight recently and I think it’s going to his head – I actually caught him practicing his autograph the other day (I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone…whoops). If you have read our column, you will know that my assault on the British Superstock 1000 Championship has been thwarted by a shoulder that keeps forgetting it’s a shoulder but this weekend I was finally fit enough to throw a leg over my GSX-R1000. My local circuit is Cadwell Park, so we got booked onto a club-level race meeting there as a bit of a shakedown to make sure the bike and my shoulder all work as they should. I’d had a go on my mate’s Gixer a few months ago but this was the first time riding mine, and I’ll tell you what, it was brilliant. There were some half decent lads there but we managed to get three wins and a second place, which was great. What I was really trying to concentrate on, though, was getting comfortable with the bike and getting down to sensible lap-times – which I did.