Zoom Bradley Smith

Moving to Polaris World and onto Aprilia machinery at the beginning of the 2008 season, Bradley Smith went on the have an incident-packed year, with pole positions, podiums, race leads, crashes and injuries all adding to his growing Grand Prix experience.

There were highs and lows for the teenager from England and with his 2008 team being disbanded at the end of the year an exciting move to the highly successful Bancaja Aspar team beckons for 2009.

Smith has a long winter of training and preparation ahead of him for what will be an important year in his career and the former Red Bull MotoGP Academy and Honda rider was in good form when he spoke from his home in Oxfordshire.

How do you summarise your 2008 World Championship experiences overall?
“I am quite happy with the way this season has gone. To finish sixth in the championship, to get three pole positions and four podiums, well if you had told me that at the beginning of the year I would have been quite pleased. Obviously, not winning a race has been quite disappointing due to the fact that I was often in contention and was never able to make it pay off, so that´s a kind of negative thing that I look back on. But generally, quite a good season. ”

Given the pole positions, race leads and competitive machinery you had, do you feel disappointed that things didn´t go better?
“At the beginning of the year there were times when I was looking at myself and asking, `why aren´t you converting these pole positions?´ `Why aren´t you winning these races?´ In the end I was looking around at the other guys and thinking, well, look at how much experience they´ve got. This is my first year of running at the front, also my first year with the Aprilia. It is completely different doing one fast lap in qualifying to the situation in a race.´ `There is a lot of racecraft that goes on and the guys put themselves in the best positions at the end of the race. There were a couple of times, in Assen and Sachsenring, when I put myself in the perfect position, I was leading, and then it started raining. Sometimes it didn´t matter whatever I tried, I just wasn´t able to put it together. It will come with experience though and next year I will be with the Aspar team, but also it will come with a bit of luck.”

So you feel you have gained from those situations?