Cameron Donald recently contested round one of the Asian Road Racing Championships on a Yamaha R6 for Singapore based team ‘Sporting Motorcycles’.

An array of unfortunate circumstances made Cameron’s introduction to this year’s championship a tough one. His first setback was when Friday’s one-hour qualifying session was stopped after just 10 minutes due to unexpected storms. Cameron had been in the pits adjusting the bike when the rain started, leaving him with no times on the board.

Cameron was able to gain momentum at Saturday’s qualifying session and finished fourth fastest, even without the Friday session times. These impressive times became obsolete when during a technical inspection Cameron’s bike, along with seven other rider’s machines, weighed in under the 167kg limit. The penalty being all Saturday qualifying times unaccepted. As Cameron had no session times recorded from Friday, he was forced to start both of Sunday’s races at the back of the grid. “This was disappointing but I remained confident as each race was 18 laps which would give me enough time to work through the packs."

Race day Sunday - the weather was hot and clear. Cameron was off to a great start finishing second fastest in the morning warm up…

Race 1 - Cameron started well and began working his way through the field to reach the leading pack that had already made a significant gap from the rest. By lap 11 he had worked his way through to second place. The Honda mounted Japanese rider Hamaguchi had already broken away to a comfortable lead and Donald finished second in the race, and in the process recorded the weekends fastest race lap. "That was the hardest second place I have ever earned, starting from the back of the grid put me in a pretty aggressive frame of mind and I think that helped a lot to push through the traffic."

Race 2 - Again Cameron rode hard to catch the leaders but could not make his way through the field as quickly as race one. By lap 14 he was in 6th place, but still catching the leaders fast. Cameron managed to take 4th place with one lap to go, then made it across the finish line in 3rd place, with a gap of less than a bike length from 2nd place. "One more corner & second pace would have been mine!" exclaimed Cameron. "I am wrapt with the results from my first two races in the title. Yesterday things weren’t looking to good so leaving here today running second on points and also setting the fastest race lap has made me confident heading into round two."

With successful first round results to build on, the next round of the series in Indonesia (Aug 1– 3) is looking good. "I am looking forward to riding Sentul. I haven’t ridden there yet but it looks good on video with a lot of fast flowing turns " said Cameron.