Victorian teenager Mark Chiodo has got to be one of the most striking young talents in the Australian Supersport Championship. Armed with a Repsol Gas Racing Triumph 675 R, with Garry House and Geoff Winzer in his corner, Chiodo has all the tools required to go for the title this season.

With experience building race in, race out, the 19-year-old will look to fine-tune his race-craft in 2017, which will almost certainly result in much silverware across the course of the seven round Australian Superbike Championship (ASBK) season.

“This year coming into it, our second year on the Triumph is a lot better,” Chiodo explained to CycleOnline.com.au “To have experience at a lot of the tracks now, we can come in and kind of start where we ended [last year]. Like today here at Wakefield, it was a bit hard coming into the round last year having to start off with new guys, new bikes and all the rest of it. Now we’re settled in and with Garry and Geoff, I couldn’t think of anything better. Working with the Triumphs and the Repsol backing, it’s all good at the moment and it’s just great to be out here having fun, I guess.”

Image: Keith Muir.

Following a relatively low-key season marred by injuries in 2015, Chiodo rose to prominence last year after transferring to a Triumph, eventually finishing 10th in the ASBK Supersport series and ninth in the Australasian Supersport Championship. His results didn’t really reflect his outright pace and he made his share of mistakes, but as they say, it’s easier to make a fast rider stay on two wheels than it is to make a slow rider fast.

“I think last year we dove into the deep-end, because I hadn’t been going quick until we did the first test at the start of the year and all of the sudden I was quick, so I expected to be there every round,” he continued. “When you’re trying your hardest and you’re not there, it all feels a little bit different and it kind of hits you and you feel like you have to catch up. In order to do that I was making mistakes and that led to just more mistakes because I would get frustrated and you would see two crashes in a day, which isn’t like me usually. On a track day I could go there and do lap after lap and be alright, then I’d go to a race meeting and it’d just be a whole different story. I’d put myself under pressure and I’d be so far behind and what to make that up.”

Part of Chiodo’s challenge was the fact that he initially learned his craft at the high-speed Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit, so to apply his skill-sets – and bike settings – to smaller tracks was something he had to learn as he went. In some ways it’s frustrating for him, looking back at what could have been on numerous occasions, but at the same time, it’s all part of the learning curve in a bid to become the best rider he can be.

“I think that’s what I found most difficult, having to set up the bike for tighter corners, when I had always just been setting it up for faster corners,” Chiodo said. “I always wondered why it wouldn’t work when I would go to turn, because it didn’t feel the same. Now, I think going to all the tracks has helped a lot in gaining experience on what we need to do, which is a shame because we missed out on basically a year where we could have been quick, but we just weren’t quick at the right tracks at the right time. We would get to Sunday and we’d be nearly there, but then we would leave that track and go to a new one and just be doing that all over again.”

Source: Supplied.

With a well-recognised and highly-respected name in Australian motorcycling, Chiodo is the son of former national level road racer John Chiodo, who many will also know of through Monza Imports. You’d think Mark been riding from the early stages of his life, however that isn’t the case because instead, he only began riding and racing a few short years ago.

“I played footy all the way up until probably 15 or 16 and then when I finished playing footy, you don’t realise what you want to do,” he reflected. “I was lucky that dad offered to take me to a ride day and get hooked on that, because you see a lot of kids get to 16, 17, 18 and they don’t know what they want to do. I kind of found what I wanted to do at 18, which was good, so yeah finding that and dad obviously being involved, we got into it full-on straight away and it has led to this, which has been great.”

Again, at round one of the ASBK last month he was blazing-fast at Phillip Island and there’s every chance he will be able to convert that speed across the country once and for all in 2017. Pole position, ninth after a crash, a win and a second during the three races resulted in third overall at the opener.