The Benelli 900 Tornado made its first laps in a race setting this week at Misano.

Riding the machine is Australian Peter Goddard. A veteran rider, Goddard has ridden four-cylinders and twins in the past, and he is one many credit with helping the Aprilia Superbike get up to speed in its first season. AMASuerbike.com spoke to him yesterday at Misano.

One of the problems that Benelli and Goddard ran into immediately is the limited number of Dunlop tires available for their uses.

Goddard explained, "It's great to be here. It's always going to be a difficult weekend the first weekend you go racing, and we've had our fair share of problems. Yesterday we got, I think, a bad choice of tires available, so we spent all day trying to find grip from tires that are never going to have grip. Today we've had some better tires that seemed to work better and the bike felt more like it had at the last test. So I think we lost all yesterday(Friday) from that.

Goddard's goal was to get the new three-cylinder into SuperPole. It didn't happen. "Unfortunately I missed Superpole which I would really have liked to have got in to, but we had an engine... we don't know what happened, it's still running but the temperature went very high so I couldn't ride it so I had to change to my second bike. We did the best we could but we're like 2 seconds off the lead time and we're 25th. It's very very competitive but I would have really liked to have done much better.

After riding just about every kind of racing motorcycle one can think of, 500 GP bikes, four cylinder Superbikes, Twin cylinder Superbikes and nearly every variation of World Endurance machine, Goddard has a wealth of knowledge to draw from. What does he think of a triple? "It's a bit of a mixture," it's got more torque and will, I think, eventually have more power than the 750 and we hope it will have similar power to a 1000 but with the added advantage of rpm and smoothness. The twins are a hard thing to beat, but I think this in theory is a very good configuration and I think once we get more sorted more down the road... but this year is the year to find the problems and have a serious go at it next year. I hope as the year goes on I think we can do much better. This is the first race so there's all sorts of things happening. We anticipated some of the problems we've had but we've had other problems that we didn't anticipate. All in all, we're going to race tomorrow which is important and the bike's not working so bad, there's little things we need to fix.

The Benelli features a rear-mounted radiator and chassis pieces that almost look as if they came from the Cagiva Research Center.

After a 30 year absence from racing, the Benelli team is well funded and has the resources to be competitive in World Superbike.