By Building on stirring pace across qualifying sessions, SMT Racing’s Rob Hodson kick started racing proceedings at TT 2023 with a strong run to ninth in the Monster Energy Supersport opener.
Earlier in the week, Road Racing News obtained a succinct, honest chat with the 2022 Classic Superbike Manx Grand Prix winner.
Firstly, we gained the Wigan racer’s thoughts on Monday’s qualifying stint, which took place six days ago, amazing how quickly time passes!
“Straight away the initial feeling was good with the SMT Fireblade (Honda), we are hoping to move forward from there, PB lap time from our third lap on it so, things aren’t too far away, fingers crossed we can progress from here.
We had a couple of issues with both bikes (Supersport/Super Twin) which resulted in us not doing any laps on them, we got some good data on the 650 because we did near enough a lap, stopped at Governor’s on that due to a small problem.”
Hodson went onto discuss the support that Chris Pike, of Honda Racing UK is providing with his 1000cc races mount (CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP).
“We’ve bounced a few ideas off him, we are very happy that he’s willing come to help us and Harv (Havier Beltran) from Honda have been great with information, anything we need we can speak to them.
Which is good to have with it been a new bike for us, there’s so much you can do with them, it’s good to have a team that has so much experience, you can’t get better than Honda UK can you, it’s brilliant.”
When posed the question, is the latest specification Fireblade already better than BMW’s S1000RR, Kawasaki’s ZX-10RR, which he has previously piloted at the TT, his answer was:
“Yes, it’s got kind of a similar feel to the BMW of 2017, obviously all bikes have their strengths and weaknesses but the initial feeling on the Fireblade, it does everything really well.
It’s all just rider preference, completely different to the Kawasaki, chassis wise and everything, it seems to be suiting so far, just need to refine things to suit me, that’ll be the key to going any quicker.”
Unofficially already into the 129-mph lap speed club, Hodson isn’t discounting a push for the prestigious Privateers Championship title.
“It would be nice but we’ve not actually thought about that too much to be honest, it’s just been a case of new team, new bikes, we don’t know how it’s going to go.
So, if we can get a happy set-up with all three bikes, I think if we can be consistent, we can stand a chance in that, be interesting.”
Photo credit: Nick Wheeler
Words by Stevie Rial #dontletfearcontrolyou
