Victory over the French Riviera in the Air Race World Championship second round has given Matt Hall the momentum he needs as the series soars on.
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This time, its back on familiar ground for the Australian gun pilot as he turns his focus to the Chiba, Japan, a series location that has had mixed results for him.
In his first race above Tokyo Bay, back in 2015, Hall flew to a second place finish in what would prove to be a stand-out year for the Novocastrian high-flyer, before a slower finish and a penalty-mark marred 2016 and 2017’s attempts.
“It’s been about eighteen months now playing catch-up with our new aircraft, and it hasn’t just been luck that we’ve got it to where it is now,” Hall said. “We’re pretty happy with where we are now, and we went into France with a ready-setup aircraft for the first time in a long time.”
“When you put that in perspective it means we may even do better in this upcoming race, last round had the final changes and without any changes coming into Chiba we can just look to improve for the rest of the year.”
Hall also revealed a “great deal of relief”, both for himself and his backroom staff, now that the “ever-changing process” had been finalised.
“It’s a great relief to see the efforts that we’ve put in are finally paying dividends, and hopefully it means we can start to move towards winning the championship in the not too distant future,” Australia’s ace pilot said.
“We aren’t going to change our key focus now though, because if you start looking at the overall standings you put a lot of pressure on yourself for no good reason. With the championship you can’t do anything more than just do the very best you can at every single race.
“It’s very easy to get distracted. When we turn up in Japan we are going to look at doing a great job there. Budapest comes later, and then more after that, and hopefully then we’re just standing on the podium looking around asking ‘how did we go?’.”
The Chiba race begins with practice sessions on Friday, May 25, with qualifying penned in for Saturday, May 26 at 5pm AEST. Hall is scheduled for a 6.10pm AEST start time.
After qualifiers, the main race will begin on Sunday with the head-to-head round of 14 (3pm AEST), with the Final 4 set for 5pm AEST. All races will be live on redbullairrace.com/live.