It’s happened again, me and technology, we’ve had a bit of a to do!!! You see it all started a while back when I was looking into options of having video clips up on the website, well, in I go to the Apple store in Bluewater armed with the new camcorder I brought for Christmas and my laptop being unable to get one thing talking to the other, the guy eventually fixed it, downloaded some updates etc and strongly recommended I upgrade to the latest Mac operating system, Snow Leopard, £25 I thought, can’t go wrong!! Typically about two weeks later (literally just before we left for Portimao I decided to load the disk and do the big upgrade) for once everything went fine, fine until I tried to open my photo resizing program that I use to fire pics up on my website and to Twitter, the program s**t itself and said no way Jose, b****ks I thought, (the upgrade version of the program I have is £350!!) so I downloaded a free 3o daytrial version to get me out of trouble and off we went to Portimao, on route there Reg suggested checking the net for something so I said no problem, connected my data stick, turned on the laptop and what happened, it s**t itself again, everytime I put the Vodafone stick anywhere near it the laptop crashed, great, oh well, get to Portimao, go in the press room, call Vodafone and download the latest version right, wrong, some arrogant twat had the audacity to ask if I’d called Vodafone beforehand to let them know I was thinking of getting a new laptop, I’m sure he was on drugs you know, anyway the long and the short of it all is I haven’t been able to keep you up to speed how I intend too so here’s a run down of what’s gone on in the two days we’ve had testing in Valencia.
Day 1, nothing!!!! Did 6 laps on what might as well of been called an ice rink, useless, no good at all so no riding, I did go ten pin bowling with Reg, Leon Camier, his manager and their motorhome driver though which was quite amusing, something even more funny was how anal Leon’s manager was about their hire car, a white 1 series BMW, well, I brought a microphone thing from PC city or whatever it’s called and asked for the car key so that I didn’t have to carry the bag around all evening, Storka (Leon’s manager) reluctantly gave me the key so I went back to the car and thought right, lets move it so I hid it right in another corner out of the way and went back to meet them, when we left a couple of hours later I told the others but not Storka what I’d done and as luck would have it there was a car near on identical to there’s not far from where he originally parked, we wondered across towards it and I saw the key come casually out of his pocket and him hit the unlock button, 1st time it never worked so he tried again, by now we’re getting closer and it’s still not opening, we get right to the car and with a confused look he says the keys f***ed, with that I burst out laughing and said I’d moved it but he clocked eyes on yet another near identical one so thought that was his, when we got to the 2nd car and that didn’t open the boys were all wetting themselves, maybe you had to be there but trust me, it was funny!!!!!
Day 2, mega!!! We woke up to a real sharp frost and the crispiest coldest morning you could ever imagine with damp patches everywhere, I was actually desperate to get out riding but there was no way it was going to happen in the morning, eventually we got out in the afternoon and got to work, I really enjoyed myself riding, we took things very step by step and I was delighted to see that the problems I’d suffered at Portimao were identical at Valencia, exactly as I told the team they would be, as I said step by step we worked on the balance of the bike and made big steps in terms of my level of confidence with the bike, I’m not going to say I wish the races were tomorrow as we still have quite a bit of work to do with the electronics but we’re probably about 80-85% now and with two days testing at Philip Island hopefully we’ll be there or thereabouts, it would appear the new Ohlins suspension is pretty sensitive but we seem to have found a pretty good base now, in Australia we’ll have a few more bits and pieces to test too which should be good. In terms of performance I actually topped the time sheets for a large chunk of the day but I think I ended up unofficially 2nd or 3rd but only 2 10th’s of a second off on standard rubber, here’s an indication of my performance, on the same tyres as last years race I lapped 1.3 faster so it’s going in the right direction.
I’m really looking forward now to a solid two or three weeks of training before we head over to Australia, I literally can’t wait to ride my bike again, I’ve got a good team behind me and a cool team mate so it’s all good here on Planet Byrneard right now, talk to you soon, #67!!!
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