As always, the weekend started early for the riders getting in a valuable free practise session on the fresh tarmac of Jerez De La Frontera - Spain.

The penultimate round of the WSBK championship 2017 was really warming up, literally in this case, with high temperatures heating the track which provided ideal conditions for many riders including Chaz. A time of 1.41.204 gave the Welshman his personal best and tenth overall.

How did FP2 go? Well, see for yourself...

Note: No Chaz's were hurt in the making of this article.

"a pretty awkward crash. Luckily I'm all right, I took a few bangs but nothing too serious"

The objective was clear in race one; get past Tom Sykes, which thankfully Chaz accomplished despite a short race of just 19 laps. Second position on the podium meant Chaz had Sykes on the ropes primed for Sundays race two.

"It was tough because we had one hour less of track time... It took me a few laps to adapt, so overall I'm happy to have been able to recover a few points on Sykes after a long game of cat and mouse with him"

Sundays' race was a little rocky when Chaz and another rider made contact resulting in a crash. Red-flagged and restarted, Chaz rode a steady race coming third, which secures second place in the championship but level pegging with Sykes on 363 points, all is to play for in Qatar. (November 2nd - 4th)

"I'm really happy with today's result... It was clear it wasn't going to be an easy round for us since Friday morning, the new tarmac threw us a bit of a curveball and we had all sorts of obstacles to jump over...the main goal was to take some points off from Sykes and now we're exactly even, so I'm satisfied with that. In 2016 we did really well in Qatar so I hope to start from where we left off last year"

We hope so too Chaz - Good Luck!