It’s been a mixed to poor month in terms of results. It’s been a disappointing start to the season and we’ve said that previously and that continued this month. I do feel our hand has been forced into making changes because we went out of both cup competitions and our league position was down at the bottom. It’s not acceptable for this club. Changes have been made and I’m disappointed to say goodbye to both Darryl (Ritchings) and Lewi (Kerr). It’s a part of the job that I don’t like doing but it is a part of the job that needs to be done and it had to be done now. I’m happy with the changes and I’m happy with the dynamic of the team now. I think for varying reasons it has improved the team quite a bit and I think our performance against Redcar, albeit one of the weakest sides we will face at home, was commanding and it was just what we needed.
The exit from the cup led to the changes and the contrasting performances at Peterborough contributed too. We showed we are capable of racing that track against that opposition and only losing in the last heat the first time. When we needed to do it and when the pressure was on to go and score league points that’s when we couldn’t do it and I had a long conversation with Ritchie (Hawkins) after that and it was decided that we needed further changes.
I want to thank Darryl and Lewi for everything they did for us. They are paying the price for our league position ultimately and time is not on our side for us to wait for them to produce a little bit more on a consistent basis. They were great to work with and were great guys and Lewi in particular will be given a spot in days if he hasn’t already got one so no doubt we will be racing against him and we look forward to that.
I still have 100% faith in Ritchie and I’m certain that the current team have faith in him too. There’s absolutely no issues between club and manager and team and manager and I’m happy that now with the team changes we have a really good dynamic in the whole team. That includes Ritchie, myself and even Bob the trackman. That plays a key role; making sure the track is how we want and I’ve read lots of stuff about the track not having enough dirt on it. Actually the track has had too much dirt on it at times and they haven’t been able to use it, it’s been too deep. We’ve changed materials and it’s been quite hard to work out how’s best to work with it. In this last couple of weeks we’ve had a lot of feedback from the team and I think everything was spot on on Saturday against Redcar and we need to take that forward and try and reproduce that. It is quite a rocket science and it isn’t easy to get what you want but we do know what we are trying to achieve.
I think given the team changes Glasgow at home and Edinburgh away are two pivotal meetings in our season at this point. Obviously we’ve got to get a win at home as we cannot afford to drop points at home because other teams won’t that we are competing against for play-off positions so we have to win that one. I do believe we can win quite comfortably if we hit top form and then we’ve got to go to Edinburgh who are not quite as good as they have been but they are still a good side. It’s never an easy track to go to, it’s a tricky circuit but we’ve got to target a win but the worst case scenario is we got to Scotland and come back with a point.
It will be the usual contenders with he exception of Tai (Woffinden) for the British Final. Although we will miss watching him race as he is exciting to watch it does open it up because he would be most people’s favourite for the title. Once you go below him I don’t think anybody can confidently say ‘this guy is most likely to win’. It’s going to be a really competitive meeting on what sounds like a really good race track and I’m so glad I’ve been given the opportunity to work on it and it will be great.
Nico (Covatti) has his Grand Prix Qualifying semi-final in early July and I want him to get into the Grand Prix Series for 2017 even though it could cause us some headaches! I won’t hold anybody back whether they are an U21 doing U21 rounds or someone doing the SEC, as Nico did and that nearly affected us! Things panned out in our favour a couple of weeks ago with that but I won’t hold back anyone trying to win championships.
Thank you for your continued support,
Chris