"When I was younger, I could never understand the attraction of Fishing. As life goes on, one starts to see the merit of relaxing pastimes like Fishing and perhaps even Golf.

When racing gets hard as it does from time to time you have days when Fishing looks like the go...... days when you just want to quit and go home. As a team we are more resilient than most. We have a reputation for sticking with it, persisting with new ideas even when it does get hard.

Fireballing two motors at the recent Winternationals was a setback, but no more than that. as always we learned something from it and as I have often said "failure is the opportunity to start again with a better plan"

This last weekend was different. over the very short winter break, the team and I spent about 300 hours rebuilding everything. The chassis was blasted checked and any small nicks and such repaired, put on the jig and checked for straight. It was then painted. We made all new tin work, undertrays and stone guards, rewired much of the bike, remounted the new Pro Mag 44s and coils, made new engine blocks and liners, fitted new brake discs, sprockets and chains, reconditioned our Honda heads, our clutches, drives and fuel pumps and generally made it as nice as we could for a new season of racing. We got it fired up and all checked only last sunday. It left for the Sydney test day on the monday.

Our equipment travels by train in a purpose built container. We arrived in Sydney early saturday morning as the only seats available were on the midnight horror form Perth . Upon getting to the track, we opened the doors and were amazed to see motorcycle soup. Our shiny new bike was badly damaged as is much of our support equipment.

Our hearts sank. After a night with no sleep, it was one of those times when you just want to give up. Why does it have to be that hard? And why does that have to happen when we have just put so much time and money into making it as nice as we could?

Fishing looked pretty good just then!

It's lucky that we went to test two weeks before the race, otherwise we would have been faced with that on race day. We spent the entire weekend repairing and checking. We will go back this weekend and work the whole week on repairs to get us through the next two races. When it gets home, it will need another rebuild to try and get it back to its best performance.

We are resilient, we are persistent and we will be at the race and going as hard as we can for Honda, Sprintex Superchargers and Gates Belts and Hose.

All the same.... I might just call in to the new Boating Camping and Fishing store just down the road on the way home tonight!"

Below is Jay Upton on a happier 6.28sec. pass at WSID.