During the July break we took the opportunity to strip all the bikes, giving them a thorough refurbishment, before moving on to the workshop itself and the truck. If it didn’t move it had a good spring clean.

We had tested at Croft on the Monday prior to the weekends race to provide Alastair with the opportunity to become familiar with the circuit and to give him the best possible chance of a result.

Qualifying didn’t go exactly to plan, and although Alastair knocked 2 seconds off his lap times, and was only 1.5 seconds off the pole time, we ended up in 22nd place. Once again showing how competitive this class is.

As we made our way to the grid for our race, the rain started, ‘deja vous’ springs to mind. Looking skywards it was difficult to determine what was going to happen. Ally had gone to the grid on his dry bike with Mark taking his wet bike to the pit lane just in case we needed to swap bikes after the sighting lap. As the bikes returned to the grid, the race officials’ declared a wet race. Nearly all the teams swapped their tyres quickly over to wets but with Neil and chief technician Derek looking skywards we decided to stay with the dry tyres. This in fact turned out to be an inspired decision.

On the first lap Alastair moved up to 15th position and as the race progressed he sliced through the field almost unnoticed to the race commentators. The riders who had changed to wets were now struggling with their wet tyres leaving chunks of rubber everywhere.

We stood on the pit wall cheering Alastair through the field each time he came round having passed more riders eventually finishing in 3rd place providing both himself and the team with their first BSB podium finish.

The elation felt afterwards by both myself, Neil and the team members after a disappointing qualifying day was unbelievable and shows the volatility of racing.

Alastair showed fantastic potential for the future and real class.

We now look forward to Cadwell Park on August Bank holiday weekend.


Note:

NCT Racing and Hayden Fitzgerald, the 22 year old from New Zealand, have parted company after a disappointing season in the Metzeler National Superstock Championship.

Neil Haslam, Team Manager, said that they have parted on good terms and that Hayden has moved to the Isle of Man for the time being. Everyone in the team liked working with him and wished him all the success for the future.

Now we are just going to concentrate on looking after Alastair Seeley for the remainder of the season in the Metzeler series while we make our plans for next year.

Cynthia Haslam

NCT Racing Ltd