Brands hatch test..

After spending what should’ve been five full days riding the Rapid Solicitors PBM Kawasaki in Spain I was more than a little bit keen to jump back aboard it in the UK and with our first UK test being at Brands hatch it couldn’t have been a better place to start because lets face it I’ve done a lap or two around there in my time!!!!

My first exit on the bike couldn’t possibly have started any better, within 4 laps I was pretty much getting on the pace, I even surprised myself a bit!! That said though due to the new technical regulations which mean a “Superbike” is no longer so “Super” what a decent lap time is or how consistent we can expect to be over race duration remains to be seen…

One thing the team had managed to do since returning to the UK was unleash a little bit more grunt from our engines and improve the way the engine responds to the amount of throttle I twist so I was real happy with that as in Spain this was a pretty big issue, winding on 100% throttle in the middle of a corner with no traction control just to get things going a bit quicker could well spell a one way ticket to the moon!!!!

We spent pretty much all the sessions at Brands working on the new Motec ECU, any ideas of this championship having a control ECU that you can just bolt in and go are miles off, so far pretty much quite literally all we’ve done at pretty much every track we’ve been to is spend the whole time working on the electronics because until you get them somewhere near the way the bike works from a chassis point of view is irrelevant, as soon as you make another change and improve the electronics you automatically knock a chunk off your lap time but then you run in to new chassis problems that you try to fix, once they’re fixed you go faster then run into electronic issues again and it just seems to carry on and on like that at the moment!!!!

I have to admit that after 80 odd laps at Brands hatch I left there not so happy because we seemed to hit a bit of a wall lap time wise, the most frustrating thing was that by the end of the day my lap time on a 32 lap old rear tyre was only a 10^th of a second off of my fastest which in turn was only a 10^th faster than my lap time that I did on my 4^th flying lap so progress in terms of lap time wasn’t made at all but we learnt a lot about the electronics in the process so we could take that information forward with us to Snetterton and hopefully build in a big way.

Putting a positive spin on things as I always like to do we know that we still have a fair bit more work to do but even so we’re there or thereabouts in terms of outright pace but from a tyre management point of view things are almost too good, usually at a small track like Brands a new set of tyres would be worth maybe half a second a lap or so, maybe a tiny bit more but the fact it gave us nothing tells us that something’s obviously still amiss, so with that in mind in two weeks time we’re looking to be in pretty good shape as we have Snetterton and maybe another test before we return to Brands hatch for round 1 so plenty of time to get things dialled in properly… Right enough from Brands, I have to type up Snetterton now, take it easy, Shakey #67