On Saturday afternoon I stood on the spot marked 1. Last year I didn’t make it past lap 1 in Qatar! What a difference a year makes. The weekend ran perfectly as I creeped my way up the order session on session. I qualified P2 behind Cal and made a decent start in the race but the rest of the front row had mega launches. I was P4 when we hit the brakes into turn one but I was leading by the entry to turn two. That was a decisive moment in the race and I led for the first half of the race before I slipped back to have a look at the other guys. I sized them up before hitting the front again with a few laps to go. Andrew Pitt give me my full of it but my engine had the edge on his on the final straight which allowed me to take the win.

There was some confusion with my pit signals but I’ll not say much about that. Basically the ‘1′ beside the ‘P’ was slightly different to the rest of the 1 collection and at 200kph it looked like a 7! It confused me but I put it to the back of my mind and concentrated on winning on track. As I crossed the line I was pretty subdued thinking I’d finished 7th! Obviously I was aware that nobody had finished infront of me but I kept wondering if I may have incurred a time penalty for any reason. It wasn’t the way I pictured my debut World Championship victory but nevertheless it was an incredible feeling once I realised the 25 points belonged to me.

This week has been pretty cool. On Monday night I went to the cinema with my friends, I was too tired for Sunday cinema club so we postponed it one day. Michael and I went motocrossing on Wednesday with our mate Tubman and it was simply fantabulous. The past few days have been rather problematic though. On Thursday I got very little cycling done but I called over to the local cycling shop to fix my rear wheel ahead of Friday’s cycle. Twenty minutes in on Friday I knew it was going to be one of those days as Michael and I had to tend to my rear wheel again. She wasn’t fixed yet so we cycled an hour and a half to the cycle shop to buy a new tyre which finally sorted it for good! Hopefully tomorrow will be problem free. There’s talk of the boys heading out tomorrow night to celebrate my debut win so that should be fun. We plan to go trials riding on Sunday though so she’ll only be a wee un.

Thanks for all your kind comments via the website; I’ll try to keep the victories coming!

Eugene