Upgrades!!!

How cool is that, we arrived at Gatwick earlier ready to fly to Orlando, i've never been so i'm quite excited anyway, we contemplated upgrading to business class for a special fee of £399 but decided against it then when we got to the desk to check in Petra asked for a window seat and the lady called through and came back saying, i can do better than that, take a Club seat, a free upgrade.... What a bloody result!!!!!

Kyalami...

I’m not a very happy boy this morning to be honest, you see the reason for this is my results again yesterday, going into Monza I knew we were going to have a tough weekend, that’s the reason I needed a couple of strong races at Assen to keep us happy, Monza was of course exactly as difficult as we knew it would be but once that race was out of the way I really looked forward to a better run of tracks for us and the Ducati, I was particularly looking forward to the race here in South Africa as last year the Xerox boys literally smoked everyone and the bikes we have are in theory a step closer to the spec that they had last year so it’s all good right….

For the first free practice session things went ok ish, fundamentally we had a bike that stopped and turned in ok but the thing made the already bumpy Kyalami circuit feel like a whoop section of a motocross track which was making pushing the front into the corner entries particularly tricky as when I was on the side of the tyre it was like being given an uppercut by the handlebars which isn’t exactly what you need!! Nonetheless we went ok, we started the session in P2 and held it for about 20 odd minutes and I was happy again, happy or should I say relieved, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a number like that on my pit board!!, I ended the session 5^th but felt pretty confident that as we got the bike riding the bumps better we’d find a good chunk more lap time wise so all good.

The first qualifying practice went a fair bit better in terms of lap time but unfortunately position wise I dropped to 9^th, we worked hard on getting the setting of the bike right but even harder on trying to get the bike pushing forward out of the turns, I’ve had a feeling since the last races that one of our bikes problems is that the traction control is actually hindering a bit as apposed to helping and perhaps restricting the bike a bit too much so my engineer came along with some different settings to this race for me to try so we worked a bit on that too, my feeling was getting better with the bike in general however it was the Mine shaft section of the track that was hurting us the most, for the first two sectors I’d get green sectors with a provisional 3^rd or 4^th place but sector 3 finished that in a big way as I was losing up to 6^th’s in that one sector, I knew the problem but we couldn’t seem to get around it, either my bike would treat the bumps like motocross jumps or if we softened things up it would be all wallowy and run wide through there which hurt us big time speed wise up the hill. Work to do….

Qualifying practice Saturday didn’t really see us make a lot of progress to be honest, in fact we dropped down the order to 12^th or 13^th I think, we continued to keep our heads down though and worked hard to find a good compromise, in all other sectors we were going pretty good and maybe losing a tenth or two but the same sector was causing me big problems still, I even resorted to trying to follow a few people through the sector to see if I was doing anything wrong riding wise but the problem was I couldn’t push the entry to the left and hold a tight line over the bumps which would then make me run a tiny bit wide, my change of direction was too slow making me need to make a much bigger deal of the right and I’d end up getting dropped by like 8-10 bike lengths, shit this was frustrating!!

For the free practice session we went out and worked real hard, for the rest of the track we were pretty much bang on, I’d improved everywhere else but the one dreaded sector, right towards the final few minutes of the session we made a breakthrough, well, you could say we made two, both bikes had slightly different ways of improving the feeling from the front end feeling but I wasn’t sure which was best as we got literally about a lap or so on each but the problem now was that we were going straight into Super pole, exactly what happened last time out at Monza.

For some reason the team chose a bit of a strange plan for Super pole, we knew already that we had one slightly iffy qualifier and one good one, usually we exit immediately on a new pair of race tyres then if needed we use a qualifier to get through the first Super pole but this time they said we should use the iffy qualifier first then a race tyre, I wasn’t at all convinced but went with it, I used the qualifier and went 11^th straight away and thought right ok all good, I’d only improved by 3 10^th’s but now I had the new rear race tyre which could maybe be better anyway, as I came round to start my laps on the race tyre I’d dropped to 16^th, the cut off point, b******s I thought, this ain’t good, I pushed real hard, too hard in fact and made some mistakes then to start my final lap I’d dropped to 18^th so I was out, I rode that lap absolutely on the limit and had some big slides, I went three or four tenths faster but missed out on going through by less than a tenth of a second, I was literally fuming, I was so p****d off you wouldn’t believe, I don’t think I’ve felt that low ever.

It took me a fair while to calm down after the session so I went off to the clinica guys to get a massage and loosen up my arms which were feeling pretty tight and whilst there I had a thought, more of the thought later….. When I got back i sat down and had a meeting with my guys and we talked, there’s some really strange stuff going on with my bike settings wise right now, both the front forks and the rear shock have springs so much heavier than last year which means less grip but my guys came up with an idea, all this year with this bike (the ride by wire throttle bike) I’ve struggled with grip, every time they make the bike softer it wallows, yet the softer setting is nowhere near as soft as my settings from last year, my feeling with the throttle isn’t good and every single session I complain that the throttle is too aggressive, the actual amount of twist of the ride by wire throttle compared to the cable throttle is much different, probably three quarters the amount of the cable one so what we think is happening is when I get to the apex I take the throttle to balance the bike but because the ride by wire throttle is so short I actually take far too much initial throttle, this upsets the bike immediately but then when the bike starts to slide and shake there’s almost no feeling or throttle left to control the slide with so the reason for the heavier springs is the throttle’s putting too much initial torque through the rear tyre causing the bike to squat too much and get upset, now in America we’re going to back to back test one bike with ride by wire and the other with a cable throttle which I had last year so I’m well excited, I’ve always been really smooth on the throttle and because of that pretty gentle on tyres but this year so far all of this seems to have gone out of the window.

Morning warm up yesterday went real well, I rode around the whole session behind James Toseland and caught him by the end of the session, my ideal time was more than quick enough to be competitive in the races but starting from 18th was always going to be tricky….

As the lights went out I got an absolutely mega initial launch and run down into turn one, someone, I think Ruben sat up on the inside of me which in turn sat me up and made me go wide, I lost time on the exit of turn two and got humped on the run up to the corner that leads onto the back straight, eventually after some argy bargy things settled down a bit and I got in a battle with Sykes and Xaus, the race for me was so frustrating, basically it went like this, stuck behind Sykes despite having a much faster rhythm, pass Sykes, immediately at the next straight get re taken by him, line him up again, make a pass, immediately he’d drive back past and so on, this went on all race long and drove me mad, eventually I broke him but it cost me so so much time there wasn’t a lot of time to catch and pass anyone else, I did manage to pass Haga and I think I ended up a pretty dejected 15^th, race two had to be better right???

I knew that in race two there could be no nonsense in the first couple of laps otherwise I’d get nowhere again, I did get a better run initially and settled in ok, I made a couple of passes and after a couple of laps I managed to get passed Guintoli, then some others, I could see Sykes up ahead and thought oh no here we go again, once again I passed him, got passed on the next straight, passed him got passé back and this went on for a bit, on one lap Tom made a bit of a mistake going town into one of the final turns but I took a look but wasn’t quite close enough but then Scassa came through and sat Tom up, no no no I thought, now I really need to pass Tom or I’ll be stuck here, once again, passed him, got passed on the next straight, this went on for two or three laps and Luca had pulled a couple of seconds on Tom, I eventually made a pass that stuck and started to chase down Luca again, I started to catch him but run out of laps so I ended up a slightly happier but highly frustrated 13^th.

Coming away from Kyalami I’m really looking forward to the race in America, sure there’s a real long straight there that’s gonna hurt us but it’s a mega circuit that I like a lot, I’ve got the cable throttle to test which should enable us to soften the bike up a bit and help me to be smoother so it’s all good, our fortunes have to change. Keep with me people, it will get better!! Shakey#67

The story of my Kyalami, passing and being re passed by Sykes on the next straight!!!

Travel woes...

Well, we managed to actually get here to South Africa which in itself was a bit of a mission, I woke up Tuesday morning and checked the internet only to see that our flight to Madrid had been cancelled, great, don’t get me wrong I understand fully how fortunate I am to get to travel the world and see lots of different places but when things seem to go wrong they go properly wrong for us!!!

After some panic phone calls to my travel agent we managed to get our flight brought forward to the flight before however this didn’t really inspire me with confidence as it was our later flight from to Madrid that was cancelled and I figured that if our later flight was cancelled how likely were we to get our later still connection to Johannesburg……

As it turned out when we got to Heathrow the people on the desk had no idea whatsoever whether or not our flight to South Africa would go, this posed a problem for me, basically my thinking was this, if I’m stranded in the Uk I can go back to mums, if I’m stranded in Madrid what on earth do I do there?

Fortunately everything panned out ok ish in the end, we sat in Madrid airport for about 6 hours with nobody able to tell us whether or not we’d be flying but finally about 20 odd minutes late they started boarding our plane, by this point we were pretty tired and just wanted to get on the plane and get off to sleep. I had to laugh once sat on board though, sat across the isle from us was a guy so fat he couldn’t get his belt on, the temperature on the plane felt about 500 degrees so matey was sweating and humming like a skunk but to actually make matters worse the guy in front of him pulled his shoes off and the smell was so crude I’ve never smelt anything like it, I told Petra, look darling, lets look on the Brightside, if we struggle to get off to sleep just get down on your hands and knees, take a deep breath of old stinky feet and we’ll be out cold for hours!!!!!! I won’t even begin to tell you how badly I wished I’d booked us business class, I even offered to pay on board but Iberia refused despite the fact business class was practically empty, I don’t rate that airline at all, this was and hopefully will be the first and last time we ever fly with Iberia….

The new Tomtom I brought just before Monza managed to redeem itself here in South Africa, when I used it to get from Bergamo airport to Monza it did indeed get us to the national park that the circuit is inside but it took us to some mud track path that had a gate at the top that was locked so we couldn’t actually get in but this time it got us straight from Johannesburg airport direct to the hotel so I’m happy with it now!!

I slept mega last night, i was so tired that we went to bed around 10pm and never woke until 8am then about 8-30 i fell asleep again until about 11, i can't remember the last time we had the chance to do that!!!

I’ve been along to the circuit today for a look around and it’s such a cool setting, little or should I say big African looking huts and palm trees everywhere, it’s real nice, it’s definitely not improved at all from last year track surface wise, it’s like a motocross track on tarmac but I guess that’s partly the fun of the place, I’m really looking forward to getting out riding tomorrow, I know we’ve got a photo shoot for a big American magazine tomorrow morning ahead of the Miller round so we’ll see what that entails, other than that it’s all good, I’ll keep you all posted on how things go, take it easy, Shakey #67

Monza... As tough as we thought it'd be!!!

I don’t think it will really come as too much of a surprise when I tell you that we knew we were going to be a little bit up against it at Monza, don’t take this comment the wrong way, you could think to yourselves what on earth is he on about Carlos has won a race and had a few podiums this year which is indeed true however when it comes to top speed we’re a fair way off of the fast bikes, i.e. the four cylinder bikes and Monza is basically WSB’s version of Snetterton back in BSB and trying to win there with up to 18kph down on the quick bikes wouldn’t happen either, here’s a bit of food for thought, from the exit of the last turn to the end of the start finish straight we were losing just under half a second per lap!!!!!!

It was really important at Monza to remain 110% positive and push to the maximum from the word go because if we were ever gonna have to work somewhere this would be the place, I arrived feeling optimistic and went out in Friday free practice revved right up, to be honest the bike setting wise felt a little bit off in terms of balance and wasn’ t letting me push too hard, certainly nowhere near as hard as I knew we could go but immediately we got to work on improving things, quite early in the session I had a bit of a technical drama, I was flat out in 5^th approaching my braking marker for the Parabolica turn, hit the brakes, back shifted and all of a sudden things didn’t sound or feel right so I had to run straight on, the problem was that normally I would go back to 2^nd and us that engine braking to pull the bike into the turn, well, you don’t get engine braking with the clutch in so I went flying straight on, everything was going fine and I was pretty much sure I had it under control but I hit the wet grass just before the gravel whilst trying my hardest to get stopped and that threw the bike sideways then in the gravel it kind of gripped and to cut a long story short I dropped the bike at about 20 mph to have probably the most pain free crash I’ve ever had!! The worst thing about it was the scooter marshal who’s job it was couldn’t find the key to the gate to get me back so I was stuck for what seemed like ages, he had a big four stroke scooter maybe a 250 or something and got on the back of me to get back to the paddock, I was so revved up at the delay that I nearly lost the poor guy off the back of his own scooter on route back!!!! I got back out on the spare bike and we continued working although that bike had a fundamentally different setting that we couldn’t change back in time we knew the direction we needed to head in, I felt more than confident that there was loads of time to come from both me and the bike but nonetheless 17^th and 18^th for Carlos and I wasn’t the norm….

Things for us in provisional qualifying improved a little, we were down to one bike because of the problem from the first session and the fact that the track started out nearly wet but not wet enough for wets meant the bike we were using was set up wet, in terms of lap time we found a fair bit and improved the feeling from the bike but even so things weren’t progressing at the rate they needed to be and everybody else had found at least the same amount if not more, at one point in the damp conditions I was up to 6^th or 7^th and feeling much happier but I think as the track gradually became nearly full dry I slipped back to 14^th, this time though I was more than positive though as on a dry track with a wet setting I’d improved a fair chunk lap time wise and I was certain that the work we’d be doing over night with the setting of the bike would help me to make a big step for Saturday free practice.

I was right about the feeling from the bike on Saturday, I immediately felt much happier and knocked about a second and a half off of my time from the day before, of course as always that in turn brings on a whole new bunch of problems to overcome and this time it was the front suspension that was the limit as braking as deep and as late as I needed to in order to claw back more valuable 10^th’s kept sending the bike to sideways so I was having to release the brakes a little then re apply them which meant I kept missing my apex’s.

Qualifying and Superpole didn’t go at all to plan, Petra left my usual two dry helmets on my stand in the garage and said in jest don’t use one of them until the final 8, bloody hell, no pressure then eh, I don’t think we’ll be using the last one!! A bit dismissive sounding I know but that was what we were up against, in the end I only managed 15^th place in Superpole which I was pretty disappointed about as I was hoping for a top ten, in the first two sessions there were plenty of guys being dicks and holding others up through the Ascari chicane which I felt was pretty out of order, I got messed up once big time and once not quite so bad, it’s obvious why they do it but bloody annoying at the same time.

For morning warm up we found ourselves trying a few different things with the bike and it felt good, I felt much happier on the brakes so generally it was all good, we had to use a different type of rear tyre to the one we’d be racing, one that was a harder compound and with the cool conditions it wasn’t good so the guys put in a used version of the one from the day before and I went back out and got going much better again so I was feeling happier about the races now.

As the lights went out for the first race I got a sensible ish start and as we stormed down towards the new layout chicane things were looking ok, I got up the inside of a couple of people and tried to follow Haga through, the race settled down really quickly to be honest but without me being nowhere near as close to the front group as I would’ve hoped, I was racing for a bit with Max Neuckichrner and Carlos and finally ended up in a bit of a battle with Luca Scassa, he and I passing and re passing each other didn’t really do us any favours to be honest as Max and Carlos came back towards us, on the last lap Max passed me down the back straight and there really wasn’t anything I could do about it so that was that P13, not great.

For race two we changed a couple of little things with the bike to help in places where I felt I was struggling in race 1 but not too much, to be honest the only thing that was going to make a difference to the result was a much better run through the first chicane to grab myself more places, this time I got a bit of a better start and was pretty much up alongside JT when it all started to go wrong as we all braked I saw James run out of room and clip the back of somebody then all hell broke loose, when Ruben got skittled turning into the first part of the chicane right in front of me I backed off a little as I thought I was bang on target for getting collected by his bike, with all the carnage I was convinced the race would be stopped anyway but then on the exit of the chicane everyone just went for it and the race carried on which left me slightly trailing behind, nonetheless I pressed on as hard as I could, again got in a bit of a battle with Max and Carlos then set about reeling in Scassa again, with about 8 laps to go Smrz passed me down the back straight and I thought hold on a minute, how on earth did that happen, his bike so I’m led to believe perhaps isn’t quite the same spec as mine but bloody hell it ain’t slow!!!!, I tagged onto the back of him and he towed us to the back of Scassa, with the three of us running together Smrz did the same to Scassa as he had to me down the back straight but by now there was only 1 lap to go, I lined Luca up for a pass into Ascari, and just preyed that I’d get my bike stopped in time, he braked and then immediately I did, initially I thought nooooooo no no no, I’ve blown it and gone in too deep but I managed to make the entrance and held him off until the line to take P9, to be honest it felt like a rostrum getting into the top 10, as you can probably imagine it’s difficult, in fact near on impossible to get worked up and excited by a 9^th place but for what it was worth I was almost happy!!

I’m very hopeful now that our bad track is now out of the way, as I said at the start this was always going to be our bogey track and it sure was, I stayed 100% positive all weekend though and worked hard with my guys to arrive at the races in the best shape possible, sure 13^th and 9^th is a total disaster by any standards but if you only knew how hard I had to work for them, well, I guess you’d feel semi the same as me. It’s on now to Kyalami, last year the Xerox bikes smoked everybody there, lets hope we can finally get this year turned around and pick up some decent results from here on in, I want some Champagne man!!!!!!! Thanks to everybody for your continued support, here’s hoping we’re going to have something to properly cheer about real soon, Shakey #67

Trying to squeeze every last bit out of my baby!!!!