John’s Blog: Looking back and ahead in the mid-season break
Hi everyone,
We’ve reached the halfway point of what’s been a very exciting but up and down start to the year! As you may already know, It’s the first year of Peugeot’s return back to MotoGP and what an exciting step back into the pinnacle of two wheel racing it’s been.
I’m very happy to be the rider who scored the first world championship point for Peugeot motorcycles with my 7th position in tricky conditions at the Argentina GP. I then backed this up adding another point to the table in Barcelona and a personal best result for me on the Peugeot in Sachsenring finished the first half of the season with a 6th position.
There’s been a lot of development in a very short time, thanks to the Racing Steps Foundation and the fact I’ve been working great with my crew chief Mark Keen. Mark’s developed my riding a lot, along with being a big influence on the new Peugeot/Mahindra gearbox that we got just before the summer break at the German GP. It’s been great having him on board with me and it’s shown in these last few races that we are doing the best we can to keep taking positive steps to get closer to the front.
The Peugeot MC Saxoprint team had also been taking very positive steps forward with it recently being taken over by Mr.Ingo Prustel. This has given the whole team a big boost and things are looking much more positive for the rest of the season.
I’ve been enjoying my summer break back home in Oban while training hard, cycling around the Scottish country side! I’ve been trying to stay on a bike as much as possible too, riding lots of Supermoto, motocross and trials. You can see lots of pictures/videos on my twitter/Instagram : johnmcp17 . I’m also doing a skydive next week so keep checking up for the video!
I can’t wait to get back out racing again and especially when we’re heading to an all new track. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we will be testing at Austria Red Bull ring whilst many of other teams will be. This is a great pity as we could do with some practice and data as we haven’t raced here before. It’s going to make it a very tough race as track time is always short over the GP weekend and we’ll be starting from scratch.
However, I’m feeling extremely motivated to get going on the second half of the season and hope you can share some good moments with me before the end of the year.
As always, thanks for your support!
John
