• Matt Hall came within a whisker of his first race win at Abu Dhabi in 2015, coming second to Paul Bonhomme by just 8/100ths of a second. (Red Bull Content Pool)
    Matt Hall came within a whisker of his first race win at Abu Dhabi in 2015, coming second to Paul Bonhomme by just 8/100ths of a second. (Red Bull Content Pool)
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Matt Hall will go to Chiba in Japan confident of a good result despite the danger of a long gap in the Red Bull Air Race robbing his team of momentum.

Speaking with Australian Flying at the Australian International Airshow at Avalon, which he attended as an Airmanship Ambassador for QBE Insurance, Hall said the long break could even work in his favour, even though he would have preferred to get back onto the race track sooner rather than later.

Hall finished a very close second to Paul Bonhomme at the first round of the series in Abu Dhabi on 14 February, but now has a three-month wait for Chiba on 16 May to see if the team can score their first ever win.

For Hall, the The final margin of 0.084 of a second in Abu Dhabi only gave him more encouragement that his team are on the right track.

"We're traveling at about 90m/s so we're talking about seven metres there at 400 kmh, so it's pretty tight racing," he said with the hint of a grin. "But the good news is that it means we can do it. I don't think it was a fluke; I've been reasonably consistent for a long time now, so it's just a matter of getting the plane up there as well and I think we've done that.

"The more interesting part is that we were half-a-second ahead of Hannes [Arch] for basically all week and it was just Paul and I dukeing it out at the top at the end. It's confidence building for us, but then again everyone else is going to try and play catch-up.

"I know where we've lost the time. Typically in training I will always experiment with the fastest line I can find, which will often be also the risky line for hitting pylons, so often in training I'll put down a faster time than I'll achieve in racing, because you're always better to fly cleaning in racing without error and be a couple of tenths off the race than to be all-out and make an error.

"I know where we could have found a little bit more speed and knocked a bit of time off with a bit more risk. Was it worth it to do it? I don't think it was worth it for that particular one, but if we were vying for the World Championship in the last race I probably would have gone for it."

When he gets his next chance in two months time, Hall says the break could actually advantage his team, because they were in a similar situation over the Winter months, only to come out and blitz all but Bonhomme at Abu Dhabi.

"I would like to keep going straight away," he mused. "I enjoy the racing; it's our core business, it's what we focus on and to get the season going so well and to have to sit on our laurels again, which we never really do anyway, it's a bit disappointing to lose the momentum.

"That said, I always try to be a glass-half-full sort of guy. When I look at the Winter break, we had our plane in Germany the whole time and got to spend only about six or seven days with the aircraft in total over the break, whereas all the other teams got to take their planes home and work on them and train on them.

"So we had a three month break and spent six days with the aircraft and had that result. We've now got a two-month break where no-one gets access to their aircraft. We've proven that we can do those long breaks and come out and do well, whereas the other teams will potentially be worse off than they were at the first race because they're going to come in less current than they were at the first race. That's my silver lining."

Adding to his confidence for Chiba are other factors that he believes will work in the team's favour.

"First and foremost is I think the plane is going well," he said. "The second is that we were experimenting with the plane at [Abu Dhabi], and at the next race we're not experimenting, we know it and we're just going to go and do it. The third is that it's a no jet-lag race for me. I'm going to go to Japan and I'll be refreshed, whereas most of the others will have the jet-lag.

"It's good for Yoshi [Muroya] and I to have a race where we'll be refreshed when we get there and stay refreshed. If I can capitalise on those items, and the team stays focused, we can once again potentially have a very good result. But, you're only ever one pylon strike away from having a really, really bad result."

 

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