McAMS Yamaha’s Jason O’Halloran leads the Bennetts British Superbike Championship points table following his hat trick of victories at the season opener but this weekend goed to a traxck that has never been kind to the Australian.

Knockhill remains the only circuit on the calendar where O’Halloran has yet to celebrate a top-three finish and he is determined to rectify that this weekend - plus it has been the scene of a nasty crash or two for the Wollongong man.

“I’ve never stood on the podium at Knockhill. It’s the only track that we race at that I’ve never had a podium at,” said O’Halloran. “So it’s a track that I need to change that and I feel like we’re in a good position to do that.

“We’re going to have to get up to speed pretty much straight away and we’re going to have to do our work as we haven’t got that night to think about it, like we would normally have with a three day event.

“The setting that we left with at the Knockhill test is what I started with at Oulton Park, and we obviously refined the Oulton Park setting over the weekend. So we’ll take that back to Knockhill and we know that the two tracks sort of relate to one another. I think that we should be in a good place from the start and there is no reason why we can’t be up the front.

You know, Knockhill for me is really important.Although I’ve been racing over here for a while I’ve not actually done that much at Knockhill. I’ve had bad experiences there in the past and I’ve not actually done that much riding there.

“It’s a track where I really needed to test. I did a huge amount of laps there in the test recently so I’m really thankful for the time we got on track. The weather was perfect for us, so I just kept doing laps all day and was learning as much as I could. We did a lot of work on the bike and but it was also for me to learn as much as I could because it’s a technical track. Although it’s small it’s really technical and you need the experience there to go fast.

“I was just like a sponge. was learning every bit that I could, trying different lines and different things on how I was riding the bike, to find out what was working, so I think we were pretty fast. There were quite a few guys on a similar lap time, so I expect it to be really competitive. Again, we’ve done a lot of work on used tyres and managed to do fast laps on tyres much more than race distance - I think we’ll be in a strong place.”