After a slightly disappointing time at Brands hatch the day before I was fully up for getting out and turning things around at Snetterton, Brands indy is a real scratchers circuit where getting to a lap time is one thing but finding the last few 10th’s is completely another and those last few 10th’s only come when you’re 100% happy and can push things to the limit, something we weren’t able to do yesterday..
My crew chief Johnny and our Showa suspension guy Sergio sat down in the morning once some of my media commitments were out of the way to formulate a test plan for the day hopeful of the fact that the electronics were going to be a little bit closer due to the work done at Brands which would allow us to start experimenting a bit with the bike from a geometry and suspension point of view, we all know form the very limited amount of work we’ve been able to do in these areas that there’s a fair bit of work we can get done in order to make the bike work how I want it to rather than how it decides it wants too at the moment, we know that we have some strong areas with the bike but our weak areas massively affect how well we can utilize the stronger areas.
Our first few exits were done on the tyres we’d used the day before and from an electronics point of view we hit the rewind button a little bit because at the end of the Brands test we seemed to somewhat overstep the mark in terms of how the bike runs into the corners, we went from a bike that was too tight and backing in sideways everywhere to one that wouldn’t shut down quick enough and nearly drove me off the circuit…not ideal!!! ;-)
It was pretty much immediately obvious that we had work to do electronics wise and from a chassis point of view my initial thoughts were confirmed very quickly too meaning we knew exactly what we needed to work on to improve the bike, the fact it never threw up any unwanted surprises from a chassis/suspension point of view was good too!!!
On one of my first few exits I caught up to one of the new Ducati’s and after getting a real good run on him (I think it was Polita) I drafted him and passed him up the start finish straight got to my breaking marker hit the brakes hard and immediately back shifted to third gear, this threw the bike sideways pretty much to the lock stop and I ran straight on at a rather rapid rate of knots into turn one, fortunately I got it straight and ran off onto the grass before rejoining the track further around, more engine braking assistance in 3rd gear then please Mr Motec ;-)
We spent the day working mainly electronic and geometry changes and kind of missed the boat a bit in terms of the best session to go fast but at the end of the day if I could buy one of the lap timers that some of the teams must’ve been using then I’d of been there anyway, the final two sessions saw the track temperature plummet and no one was going anywhere near as fast as they reportedly had been but it was in the final session when everything kind of came together for me, a run of about 10 laps saw me record a very consistent and relative to what everybody else was doing very fast lap times so whilst from an outright chest out bragging exercise we never posted the fastest outright lap when we started to get things going good in less than perfect conditions we were as fast if not faster than just about everyone on track from what my guys saw of all the other top guys.
A debrief after we finished riding with my crew chief and members of the team has lead us to the conclusion that we can be very happy with the work we got through at Snetterton, we’re hoping now to get one more test in on the bike before Brands although that is yet to be confirmed because we literally touched the surface of the geometry and suspension changes we made yet it made me so much happier on the bike, I literally can’t wait for my next test if not the first race at Brands, I think we’re in pretty good shape, it’s not going to be easy but then if it was everybody would win, I’m certainly up for the challenge that’s for sure!!! Before I sign out I just want to say a big thanks to the team for all their hard work since Spain and to Shoei and Alpinestars for pulling it out of the bag too, good job and many thanks to you all!!! Right enough typing for one day, take it easy, Shakey 67
No comments:
Post a Comment