By Seven years ago, at a rainy Spring Cup meeting, twice Junior Manx GP winner Michael Sweeney tackled for the first time the iconic, 2.43 miles long Oliver’s Mount road-race circuit.
Fast forward seven years and the Skerries ace was back at Scarborough, with the EM Building, KBS supported R6 Yamaha, ER6 Kawasaki machines.
The 2019 Duke Road Race Rankings Champion was also racing one of Mistral Racing’s ZXR 750 Kawasaki’s.
In between practice, qualifying sessions on Friday, Road Racing News gained the quick-witted racer’s views on a range of topics, beginning with his thoughts on claiming a long awaited, first Irish Road Race Superbike Championship title.
“Yeah it’s good, I’ve been waiting a couple of years to win the Superbike Championship.
I’ve been trying f****n I don’t know ten years trying to win it, it’s always been Sheils (Derek) or McGee (Derek) or someone, it was nice to win it this year, been trying long enough to get it.”
Explaining why he opted to end his 2022 roads campaign at Scarborough, he stated:
“Andy and that were onto me and they asked me would I come over, thinking about it and then I said you know what should we have a bit of craic, no pressure, no Championships to fight for.
Last time I was here, think it was 2015, so got to re-learn the place, lovely morning, got loads of laps but
unfortunately now this rain is coming down!”
When asked about if any other meetings are on the horizon during 2022, Sweeney who took six top three finishes from the past weekend’s competition, stated:
“We might go and do the Anglesey Grand because I don’t think were going to Macau this year because of the
quarantine situation is.
It’s ten days quarantine, which is just to much for my team to come, cause they all have full time jobs, it’s just too hard to get them all to go cause you have to be over for at least 19 days.
So I don’t think we are going to bother with that, not unless something drastically changes but I can’t see it, so we will probably just go and do the Anglesey Grand meeting, have another fun weekend.”
Looking towards the 2023 season, Sweeney was brutally honest:
“I’ll be racing but I don’t know which way I’m going or what I’m doing, I don’t know. I’ll be doing obviously the International meetings.
I don’t know about all the small roads, it’s a lot back in Ireland, there’s six, eight, ten of them in a row, it’s hard when you come back from the TT and it’s weekend bang, bang, bang.
So, I don’t know we’ll see but me saying that now, I’ll probably be at every bloody road race the usual!”
Words by Stevie Rial #dontletfearcontrolyou
