Aussie Chad Reed is in a positive mood following his fifth place at Anaheim 1. Image: SupercrossOnline.com.

Australia’s Chad Reed has given his brand new TwoTwo Motorsports team an A+ report card for his fifth place finish in Saturday night’s opening round of the 2011 Monster Energy AMA Supercross, an FIM World Championship.

The multiple World Supercross Champion realised a dream at Anaheim, successfully debuting his new team TwoTwo Motorsports at the opening round of the new year at Angel Stadium.

With team ownership being one of the final challenges in his stellar career Reed assembled the infrastructure, staff and sponsors in the short space of nine weeks and finished a credible fifth in tonight’s opening round.

In his debut event on-board the TwoTwo Motorsports Honda CRF450R Reed qualified third and finished his heat race fourth before lining up for the 20-lap main event.

“Overall it was a positive night,” Reed stated. “Being a brand new team we needed to go racing to see where we were at with not only our bike but also our structure and how we do things.

“It all ran well and went relatively smoothly. We have a few tweaks to do here and there but we definitely 100% achieved our objectives that we set going into the race.

“A podium result would have been an absolute fairy tale but it wasn’t something I had in my mind and wasn’t realistic given the short space of time we had to put the team together,” Reed said.

Acknowledging there were a few areas they needed to work on before the next round Reed said he was extremely proud of what the team had achieved in such a short timeframe.

“Top five from the back of the pack is a good solid result and although I feel the fittest I have ever been and we have done a lot of laps in testing, it has been a while since I my last AMA Supercross race so I need to sharpen up my racecraft in a few areas,” Reed explained.

“I am absolutely pumped It took a lot of hours from a lot of people to get here tonight and although the result doesn’t show it to many, I think we deserve an A+.

“The best is yet to come,” he concluded.

The second round of the series will be held at Phoenix Chase Field on this Saturday night.