World Supersport 2004 - Round 1 - Valencia - Sunday

Ten Kate Honda’s Karl Muggeridge took 8th place in a tough race in today’s opening round at Valencia in Spain, while his team mate Broc Parkes crashed out on lap three after leading the race for the first two laps.

Muggeridge got a reasonable start and felt quite confident for the first five laps of the race. But then to the surprise of everybody, his lap times started to get about half a second slower and soon it proved that there was something wrong with the tyre selection.

Muggas and his team decided before the race to go for the safe bet and take the medium rear tyre out of the three they had for selection, but the safe bet wasn’t that safe, and it started tearing after 5 laps and it was like riding a wet tyre on a dry track.

Muggas comments: “The bike felt great and I was confident for a good race, although Broc got a great start, but I could see that he was going a bit too fast when it started to rain and I slowed down a little, just before I saw him high-siding. I wasn’t too worried when Charpentier came passed me; I thought I let him lead the race for a little while as he had a jump start anyway, but then the lap after a noticed that my rear started sliding pretty bad, which was really quite a shock. I had to be so careful going into every corner, so I didn’t crash as there was no grip at all. We basically just made the wrong tyre choice, otherwise the bike was working really well and we should have been on that podium after all the testing we had here. It’s really a bit disappointing.”

The two Yamaha Italia riders took first and second and last year’s race winner Katsuaki Fujiwara grabbed third place.

The Ten Kate team will be having another test tomorrow with Honda HRC in Valencia and then the preparation for the riders home event in Phillip Island will start.

The new USB Power Commander is already available for the ZX-10R, as is a powershifter