I didn’t appreciate how appropriate a description ‘the little circuit with the big view’ is for Mallory Park until I saw the British Superbikes there yesterday.

With lap times of about a minute, it’s really very short. You can walk around the entire perimeter of the track, and there are some fantastic viewing points – particularly the back of the hairpin, where you can also see the new chicane.

The highlight of the day was Michael Rutter‘s astonishing victory in the second Superbike race. It had been raining for the Supersport race, so the track was wet, but with blue skies it was clearly going to dry out. Every combination of slick, intermediate and wet front and rear tyres was represented on the grid, so it was a genuinely fascinating race.

Rutter is famously good in the wet, but the way he handled the early wet conditions on slick tyres was just brilliant. Even Shane Byrne – who was on predictably excellent form – couldn’t make up ground to him. The reaction to Rutter’s victory from the crowd around me was tremendous; he returned the compliment by throwing his boot to us – sadly a little way to my right.

Close behind in terms of highlights was an incident in the first British 125GP race – delayed from Donnington – where several riders just sort of slowly fell on top of each other at the hairpin on the first lap.