Coxhell scored ninth overall at Hidden Valley in his debut with BMW.

Barely a week after riding the brand new and essentially untested BMW S 1000 RR race bike for the first time, 2003 Australian Superbike Champion Craig Coxhell put in a superb performance to score a top 10 result at the second round of the Viking Group Australian Superbike Championship at the Hidden Valley Circuit in the Northern Territory last weekend.

Coxhell’s result was impressive from a number of standpoints, his CJC Racing program coming together late after missing round one of this year’s title chase in February, however he was still able to claim an impressive ninth overall for the round.

The team had literally wheeled the new bike out of the garage on the Friday before the event, putting in a dozen laps at Winton in Victoria to make sure the major systems were okay, before loading them on the team transporter for the four-day, 4000-kilometre trek from the team’s base of Shepparton in Victoria to Darwin.

CJC’s bikes are still Superstock-spec bikes running standard production engines, with no testing or setup data to build on, making for a promising debut for the Bisley Workwear-backed team.

“We’re obviously delighted with this weekend’s top ten result and excited for the year ahead,” Coxhell said. “The stock bike is really strong and there’s a lot of potential there once we get the setup more sorted and are able to do some development.

“We were playing catchup against the other teams this weekend [because] we missed the first round as the bikes weren’t available yet and we quite literally finished bolting them together last week. By the last race we were only a second a lap of the guys in the top five, so with a bit of testing before the next round hopefully we can start putting the pressure on them again.”

Coxhell has received great support in developing the S 1000 RR, released for the first time in 2010, and is thankful for that support.

“We’ve got a lot of people to thank for getting the new BMW S 1000 RRs on the grid,” he continued. “Chris Bussenschutt and the team from BMW Southbank for their fantastic support and encouragement in particular. “I also want to make a special mention of Peter McCauley from Darwin’s Prestige BMW who went out of his way for us this weekend, bringing some diagnostic gear down from the shop and even robbing some parts off his demo bike for us when we had some issues.

“We met a lot of great BMW fans up here this weekend as well and hopefully put a smile on their faces, the folks from Darwin really got behind this event this weekend – it’s a credit to them.”

Coxhell will continue his progress when the series visits Queensland Raceway on 3-6 June for round three of the 2010 season.