FROM THE TRACK: Technical Faults at the Season Opener!

A string of unfortunate events at the Season Opener!

The 2019 season is here!

Unfortunately the excitement was soon dampened momentarily after Morello Racing Kawasaki's Superstock 1000 rider Chrissy Rouse suffered a spat of bad luck immediately at the season opener.

Unfortunately, following a technical problem during the qualifying stage, the Morello Racing Kawasaki team were forced to work flat out to fit a whole new engine to Chrissy's ZX-10RR - which they managed just in time for Saturday's double race where Chrissy managed to pull off an impressive thth place in the first leg of the race, which given the lack of testing time after changing out the engine!

Another spat of bad luck struck though... the powerhouse ZX-10RR began to suffer an oil leak in the closing stages of the first leg, and with only 10 minutes to fix the problem, unfortunately Chrissy had to drop out of leg 2 of the race.

Looking forward to Sunday, I'll bet!

But, as we all know - bad luck strikes in threes...

In Sunday's standard length race, right in the very first lap with all the enthusiasm in the world - Chrissy set off quickly but as the third and final strike of bad luck landed, another rider hit the young racer from behind which lead to Chrissy crashing out of the Sunday race. His bike suffered a significant amount of damage which would need some serious time on repairs...

Chrissy did have a few words to say about the race weekend, and in an extremely professional manner he is looking forward to the rest of the season, and put the season opener in the past.

Over to Chrissy!

“It was just one of those weekends, just about everything that could go wrong went wrong,” he said. “We knew it was going to be a hard weekend anyway, but no-one could’ve expected so much to go wrong.

“I’m really disappointed. After the oil leak in race one I was hoping we’d get a good race on Sunday so to be taken out in the first lap was just devastating. It’s a shame because the bike is very badly damaged and the team has a big job on now to get it ready for the next round.

“Perhaps it’s a good thing to get this bad round out of the way early, so we can now just look forward to the rest of the year and concentrate on coming back at Oulton for the next round ready to start afresh. It’s a long season so there’s plenty of time to turn things around.”