Youthful talent Ted Collins was crowned the 2017 Australian Supersport champion last weekend at Sydney Motorsport Park’s penultimate round of the Yamaha Motor Finance Australian Superbike (ASBK) Championship presented by Motul Pirelli. The Next Gen Motorsports rider was able seal the title with round to spare after extending out a comfortable advantage, with fifth overall enough to get the job done on Sunday. CycleOnline.com.au tracked down the rising star to gather his thoughts after an emotion-filled day.

Image: Keith Muir.

Ted Collins, you’re a newly-crowned Australian Supersport champion with a round to spare, it must be an awesome feeling.

Yeah, it definitely takes the pressure for the last round. The team has worked unreal all year, we did all the hard work at the start of the year and got that big points lead – that made this weekend a lot easier as well, and we were able to just bring it home and get the championship. I’m over the moon, I can’t thank my team, my family and everyone enough for all their hard work – it’s unreal to be here.

It looked like you were riding with the championship in mind all weekend.

Yeah, I definitely didn’t want to do anything silly and throw it away. Coming into the weekend it was definitely ours to lose – we had a lot to lose – while the others didn’t really have anything to lose. They had to go out there and push 110 percent, and you know, we didn’t need to get involved in that. We did what we needed to do and just brought it home in the end.

In terms of Phillip Island, it will be nice to go there with the championship to your credit and really try and get a couple of wins.

Yeah, that’s it. There’s absolutely no pressure going into the last round – no nothing – so we’re just going to go in there and give it 100 percent every race and see where we end up.

Image: Keith Muir.

From this point in your career to get this achievement, have you thought about what’s next or what you would like to try in the future?

You know, we haven’t really thought about what’s next, we just have to see what happens and finish this year off – that’s probably the first thing. We still have one round of this to go, so we still have to look towards that – and that’s not going to be easy, so we have to do our best for that. After that, we’ll start thinking about what’s next and what we’re going to do for next year.

Coming into the season I knew you really came on strong going into the Winton round, was this a realistic goal for you coming in – did you know you’d be right there in the hunt?

Yeah, definitely. All the training and testing we did in the off-season was so we could win the championship. That was definitely the goal from the start – that was the goal and that’s what we were trying to achieve. But to get there is definitely a different story.

Awesome, well done.

Thank you.