Eighth place despite the struggles
Added on Monday, June 1st, 2009 by Carole Nash Editor
Eighth place despite the struggles
I was at Donington this weekend and what a struggle it was!
The weekend started badly with the bike leaking oil in the first session and after three laps it was flagged off track and sent back to the pits. We had to strip it for the afternoon qualifying. The mechanics thought it was an oil filter problem so they changed the filters, we went out into the qualifying and the same thing happened again! It was back to the drawing board, the team worked very late to solve the problem and in qualifying 2 we managed to scrape 7th place, which was a great result and it meant a second row on the grid.
Unfortunately there were still some problems. When I tried some practice starts it was hard to get off line, which came to haunt me at the race start. It was difficult to come off line and a bike hit me! I managed to stay on but dropped back to 14th place, so I really had my work cut out.
Eventually I pulled through to 6th place but the clutch started to go wrong and I ended up finishing in 8th place, it was a great battle to the end and I was lucky to finish the race! There was oil all over bike, the team have a lot of work to do as we are at Thruxton in 2 days. I hope it will be all sorted as Thruxton is my favourite track.
Speak to you all very soon
Best wishes
Howie #43
