Caterpillar EPS Yamaha rider Daniel Falzon kicked off his Australian Supersport title defence in convincing fashion at Ipswich, sweeping the races and giving himself an important leg-up in what will be a short, sharp season.

CycleOnline.com.au broke down a successful weekend with Daniel including two vastly different races…

Image: Deus Images.

Let’s look at the structure of the weekend first and foremost. Does the two-day meeting suit you or do you prefer to run with the regular three days?

I think we adapted quite quickly to the two-day format, but if it was up to our team we’d like three days. It’s a long way to go to Queensland to only have two days on the track.

It will sometimes mean if we are going to a new track or one we haven’t been to for a long time, that we’ll have to go there two weeks earlier to test.

It tends to be an expensive exercise and I don’t think the two-day meeting saves money because the main teams are still going to be going up there weeks earlier.

On current form your main competition heading to Queensland would be the Yamaha R6s of Callum Spriggs and Aiden Wagner. Did you feel like they came in with that slight edge of racing at their own home track and how do you combat something like that?

Of course there’s always a bit of an edge. You tend to learn little things about your home track from being there so often like I know at Mallala. I’ve raced Queensland many times and I knew that from the get-go I could be fast, if Aiden and Callum were going that quick.

From practice one I pushed hard, and we set the fastest time in qualifying one which was great because it got me in the right mindset.

As predicted the Supersport Superpole was close, with Aiden getting the nod by 0.248s. Do you feel you put in your best lap there?

I feel I did probably my best for the Saturday. I put down a really fast time, and then bettered it again the next lap, only to turn around and see Aiden right behind me. I actually didn’t know he was there and he probably got a bit of a tow. But he rode well and I’ve got to give it to him, that’s a mighty quick lap time.

Fast-forward to race day now. It was close in the early stages but you managed to make your way into the lead and pull a gap. Good to get a win on the board first up?

Race one was great. I set out there with the goal of staying with the other two, and then hopefully making a break a bit later in the race, depending on the tyre situation. Because we hadn’t had much testing time, we didn’t know what the degradation was going to be like on the Dunlops versus Pirelli, so we were kind of doing some testing in the race, in a sense.

I knew after about six laps I was getting comfortable with the bike, and I made the move to first and really put my head down to try to break the gap. At Queensland, to break the slipstream is so important.

If you can manage to do that it’s very hard for second place to stay with you. I put out my fastest lap of the weekend, a 1m11.8, just enough to drop the slipstream, then a 1m11.9, and got my gap to one second. There was less pressure there and I held that out to the end of the race.

Image: Andrew Gosling.

You made it two from two for the weekend but the dynamics of the second race were very different. Talk us through the red flag restart and what was going through your head when those massive storm clouds began to roll in?

The start of the second race we weren’t too worried about it. We were watching the radar but as we hit lap seven there was the red flag and the first thing that came to my head was having that wet bike ready. Thankfully we had the bike back at the pits.

We went back out and I was lining up on the grid I looked up to see the most daunting clouds I’ve ever seen in racing just rolling in over the circuit. I really tried to go fast from the start and to make sure I was leading over the line on laps eight and nine, so we’d completed 75 percent of the race.

It literally was the cool down lap where it started spitting, and by the time we got into the pits it was a torrential downpour.

You’ve made a great start to the championship. Just how important is it to get two wins straight up given that this title may well be decided over the course of six races, only four of which remain?

It has been a perfect start to the championship defence. This year is different to any other year, to my knowledge, in the championship’s history. To only have maybe six races it is paramount that we stay on every race and manage to get some decent points. There’s no room for error and no time to make up lost points.