Cartagena, permission to land!!!

Having had a supposed couple of days on the bike tuned into what really ended being about 50 odd laps at Aragon I was keen to get to Cartagena to get some testing done alongside some of the other teams, armed with what we'd been told were lap times that we'd be needing to do and the current BSB champion and Nori Haga to use for reference, for sure the completely different nature of Cartagena which is far more similar to a BSB track compared to where we'd been was going to throw us a few curve balls but it'd be interesting nonetheless.
My first exit was made on some used tyres from the day before in Aragon and literally within about 4 or 5 laps we were into an ideal ball park lap time which was good but immediately it was obvious we had lots of work to do on the engine braking side of things as well as working on throttle connection, for the first time we made some slightly bigger changes to the bike chassis wise and then I headed back out onto the track with some new tyres and had a bit of a go at things, for me the changes we'd made weren't perhaps working as well as we'd hoped so we stuck a few laps in just for some data and for my reference then pitted to make some more changes, after some more changes I headed back out and did another 5 or 6 laps but in that time I knew we had more work to do so when I caught up to my Superstock team mate Keith Farmer I though right I'll follow him for a lap or so then lead him around for a lap to show him what I think he should be doing, the first part went entirely to plan, for me I could see some stuff that I could show him and help him with immediately so going into the final turn I ran up the inside of him, indicated to him to tuck in behind me then the next thing I knew I was looking down at him from about ten ft up in the air thinking what the f**k just happened there, then..... Bang, down I came practically with snow on me slammed straight into the floor, dazed, confused and concerned about my foot that I'd recently broken and having taken a big bang to my left knee I laid there for a bit gathering myself still trying to work out in my head how I'd got flicked so hard when I'd done absolutely nothing wrong, I got taken off to the medical centre to be examined and other than a big graze and a swollen left knee, a sore foot and a couple of toes that are probably going to be nail less in the very near future I was relatively ok.
Due to the fact we hadn't started unit lunch time anyway I decided to sit out the rest of the day, fortunately the bike was extremely lucky breaking a gear lever and a handlebar as well as scratching a fairing panel, Johnny my crew chief downloaded the data from the bike and believe it or not I was off the throttle when I got flicked so my only mistake was maybe being on a tighter line than normal, to finish off an incredibly unlucky crash that both needn't and shouldn't have happened!!!
As you can maybe imagine I was a little bit sore the following day but more than ready to get back on and get cracking again, I got back on track first thing in the morning and despite feeling a bit uncomfortable and struggling a bit to back shift whilst hanging off the right hand side of the bike I didn't feel too bad, I got straight onto or just under my pace from the previous day so it was back down to work again!!
Cartagena showed us we needed a great deal more work to do on engine braking and from a gearing point of view there was nothing we could do to help the bike to settle a bit, one thing we were seeing though was that we seemed to be making tyres last very well which is encouraging. Whilst circulating on a shorter run I noticed Rat Boy had ran on into the last turn, he was there for at least two or three laps, I never even realised he'd fallen down in the gravel but concentrating on my own thing I managed to have another tiny slip off which was a bit of a bummer, i lost the front going down into the penultimate hairpin, it was a really gentle little slide off and once again just a handlebar and a footpeg so from that side we were lucky, obviously i was a bit gutted to tip off again but really i consider that my first crash and its always nice in a funny kind of way to get that out of the way!!! We managed to get through a fair bit of work throughout the day and whilst I left it way too late to have a proper go at a lap time that wasn't really what we were there for, it's great being fastest but we were more than in the ball park so I was cool with that, time for another road trip, this time slightly further south to Almeria, a track I hadn't been to since 2008 so I was really looking forward to getting out there, Tommy and Nori were testing there too so again another real good point of reference!! Right, that's Cartagena done, take it easy, Shakey #67