DesmoSport Ducati’s Callum Spriggs openly admits that the opening round of the Australian Superbike Championship (ASBK) at the Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit was a difficult debut race meeting for him.
Having to start from thirty-sixth position in the three races down south, due to crashing in qualifying, the 22-year-old Queenslander went on to score a eighteenth place in race and sixteenth place in race three. In race two however, Spriggs was forced to retire after his shift lever bolt became loose in the dying laps.
“The first round was a character-building round, so to say,” Spriggs told AMCN.
“With round one behind us now, we can look at what went wrong and work from there and improve those little areas and try and not make those mistakes such as crashing in qualifying.
Sure it was bad luck what happened to us in race two, but that’s racing. Stuff like that unfortunately happens,” said Spriggs who is aiming for a top ten overall finish this weekend at Wakefield Park.
At last week’s test at Wakefield Park, Spriggs was able to put in some consistent lap times throughout the day on the Ducati 1299 Panigale S and more importantly, in the race run which and his team did in the later part of the Tuesday afternoon.
“I believe I went pretty well. I was feeling good on the bike and able to do consistent lap times throughout the test,” explained Spriggs who did roughly around seventeen laps.
The following day, which was affected by wet weather, Spriggs made full use of it by getting his eye in on what the Italian machine is like to ride, as obviously he has never ridden a Superbike machine in the wet weather before that day.
Spriggs explained; “I was just trying to get the feel for the Ducati in the wet conditions. I was taking it easy as Wakefield is pretty slick in the wet.
Overall the Panigale feels really nice in the wet, as its nice and smooth with lots of power, but easy to use as the Ducati has heaps of torque. This enables me to use it and not have to rev it so hard, which makes it easy.”
Just like former DesmoSport Ducati rider, Mike Jones, Spriggs is also very lucky to have the former three times World Superbike Champion in Troy Bayliss (Co-owner of the team) in his corner giving him a few tips here and there, when needed.
“It’s been great having Troy helping me here and there. Obviously he has spent most of his life racing Ducati’s so he knows a thing or two about them. Troy has mainly just been guiding me in regards to bike setup when I need a hand, which is fantastic to have as it helps a lot,” concluded Spriggs.
Words & Images: Russell Colvin