Oulton Park British Superbikes Round 3

I went to Oulton Park not in the best frames of mind. Things in the team I was riding for hadn’t been going too good and I was getting the feeling I’d made a mistake in allowing other people to get so involved in my racing. Three of the people who were meant to be there for the season had dropped out after Thruxton. I was happy to see them gone; I don’t dislike them as people but I think they had a negative approach to racing and as I was at British level it was really beginning to affect my game.

Oulton was a track I’d never really been to before and in all honesty it was a disaster. We just didn’t have the setup and we didn’t have the pace either for the first two days. After a chat with the Embassy Map Triumph team they agreed to show me AJ Ventor’s gearing. AJ is a great rider but he’s a guy I’d out qualified at Thruxton. When he was actually five seconds in front of me going into final qualifying I knew I had to do something drastic. I totally changed the gearing on the bike I went from using 6 gears to 5 and the difference in teeth was huge. It was nice to see how many people were willing to help when they knew something was wrong with me. Deck Crutchlow, Cal’s dad, was great all weekend and he hooked me up with the Embassy guys. He also held Cal’s pitboard out during final qualifying. I was in 38th place with 3 minutes to go and I’d improved my time by nearly 3 seconds on the previous 2 days’ efforts.

Then Chris Northover went down and they stopped the session. I came back to find I’d been pushed out to 41st which is the first reserve spot and I was gutted. I hadn’t qualified for the first time in my life and it was by just 0.016 and I knew had I of changed my setup earlier I’d have been able to go a lot faster. We’d also found a few small problems with the bike over the weekend and after the weekend we’d discovered my tire pressures had been set at 38psi – cold! It’s not an excuse, it’s fact, but I’d learnt my lesson the hard way.

The team and I agreed to part ways after this round and went back to my old setup with my Dad and Brian Nicholson the only two guys helping me at meetings.

By: Sam Middlemas