Fleetwood rider Ryan realises a dream at Brands Hatch

The Myerscough College motorsport lecturer made the trip for round six of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship, where he would ride a Yamaha R6 in the Quattro British Supersport Cup class.

Thursday was a day of setting up as Garside had some laps on the push bike with one of the frontrunners, Ben Currie, in order to get some much-needed pointers.

The following day brought some difficult practice sessions as the Fleetwood rider’s bike was overheating after only a handful of laps.

As a result, he was unable to put together any kind of run – or learn much – in either session: not what he needed when taking on a new track.

However, one of the other riders – Ben Tolliday – let Garside use one of his spare large radiators, which saw their temperature issues vanish.

Qualifying was always going to be a challenge, given there was an oversubscribed class for the weekend.

Nevertheless, Garside managed to set down a time of 1:33.0, which was good enough for 35th on the grid and a position with which the team was happy.

The heavens then opened and meant the opening race saw riders dealing with very wet conditions.

Garside managed to finish 25th overall and sixth in class, despite losing out on the run to the line for the second race running.

That was mainly down to the reduction in power since the Snetterton round, which saw the team having to replace the number one engine.

The second race was much drier with Garside starting 30th, directly in front of the TT racer Davey Todd.

Todd quickly disappeared from view as Garside experienced an awful start, being boxed in at every corner on the first lap and having a lot of work to do from that point onwards.

He fought hard though and managed to be 23rd on approaching the start/finish straight, only to be overhauled again with the line approaching.

Nevertheless, it was a good weekend with the team doing a fine job ahead of the next race, which comes at Thruxton the weekend after next.