It was held at the brand-new motorsports complex called “The Bend Motorsports Park”, the complex is world class and is by far the best facility we have in Australia. The track design is unique in offering eight circuit configurations with the longest being 7.77kilometres long. For round three of the ASBK we used the International circuit which is 4.95 km’s in length with 18 corners.

The meeting was held over four days as the round of the ASBK was combined with the Asia Road Racing Championships. Troy only competed in the Supersport 300 class as the R3 Cup did not compete at this round.

Thursday practice day had two sessions at 30 minutes each for Troy to learn the track and get a good bike set up, being a brand-new surface there was not a lot of rubber on the track surface and was difficult to work out what the grip level was of the freshly laid track.

Friday Troy had one practice session and he felt good and was looking forward to the first qualifying session of 20 minutes later in the afternoon, unfortunately Troy did not set the time he wanted and was back further than expected but this was okay as there was a second qualifying session to be held early Saturday morning.

We arrived at the track early Saturday morning to see there had been a lot of rain overnight at the circuit and was still drizzling, this was not a good situation as there was no chance of improving on lap times on the wet circuit. The weather was going to clear and be fine for the rest of the weekend. Since Troy’s class was first up in the morning only a couple of riders went on circuit, we decided not to go out and risk a crash as he was not going to improve his qualifying time in the conditions and had to settle for the poor grid position. The first race later that day Troy got a reasonable start and was in a tight group of about 10 riders and ended up with 18^th place. Race two Troy got an awesome start and was quickly up 13^th place when unfortunately, on the third lap was taken down by another rider in turn one a very fast part of the track, Troy managed to get the bike up out of the gravel trap and get restarted but was already a lap down.

After a late night repairing the bike for the final race on Sunday Troy said he was still sore from the crash yesterday but he’d see how he’d go. He managed to finish his race but did not score any points towards the championship.

Over for another weekend of racing and another long drive home to get ready for the next round, Troy will miss round four at Hidden Valley, Northern Territory, but will be ready for round six at Winton in early September. Troy would like to thank his dad for driving him to and from each round and test days, fixing and repairing the bikes and keeping them looking in mint condition, his sponsors and supporters for their ongoing support.