Tom Neave

2022 is go! The wait is over and god it feels good to be back at the race tracks. It’s felt like an eternity waiting for race season to come round this time. Usually I spend my off seasons preoccupied with rehab from some kind of surgery, but not this time! I’ve come into the season fighting fit, which is just what I need as I step up into the Superbike class. I managed to get a bit of riding in on the MX bikes, but in terms of laps on my new Honda race bike I’ve not done anywhere near as much as I’d hoped to heading into round one at Silverstone over Easter weekend.

My first outing on the bike was at the official BSB test at Snetterton and the weather was glorious, the bike was a rocketship, and it met all expectations of what I thought it would be like. Having only ridden Superstock bikes for the last three years, I could definitely tell I had something special between my legs rolling out of pit lane. The stand-out points were the ultra-smooth gearbox shifts, the power delivery that just keeps on pulling down the straights, and the front brake system that wants to put you through the screen when you pull it – everything is and feels different to what I’ve been used to. I thought having super-soft slick tyres compared to the hard treaded tyres we have to use in Superstock was going to knock a second or so of my lap time just like that, but that wasn’t the case either; you really have to work the tyres hard and push the front to get any kind of feedback from them. Safe to say the bike taught me a lesson in respect when on day two of the first test I high-sided out of turn four and put a premature end to the three days with a couple fractured bones in my right hand. None of the bones where displaced, thankfully, and after a trip to Ipswich the following day to get some laser and magnetic therapy treatment on my hand, I was back out on the MX bike only a week later. The next test at Donington was cancelled due to rain and freezing temperatures, and the Silverstone test a week later wasn’t much better, although we did get some laps in. So, all in all I’d had about three days trying to figure out my new machine before rocking up to round one, so I was feeling a little apprehensive.