In his exclusive columns this season for Crash.net, Isilon MSS Discovery Kawasaki’s Michael Rutter talks about the early part of the season and his road racing debut on the Kawasaki at the North West 200 …..
Hi guys,
It’s been flat out lately, I’ve been non stop! I’ve been doing a lot of launches for the North West 200 and the Isle of Man TT it has been one thing after another. We had a nice time on the Isle of Man, the sun was shining and hopefully when we get to the TT it will be something like that.
I can’t believe we are already four rounds into the Bennetts British Superbike Championship. The first round at
Brands Hatch was a leap forward for us. Every meeting we go to we have no data whatsoever so we have to start from scratch each time. At
Thruxton it took us a bit of time to get going. Qualifying didn’t go too bad and the first race was alright and the second race….. well every second race we leap up the field a bit and we have a good ride. But it is just difficult because we need a lot of testing time and we haven’t got it before the event so I know it is the same for a lot of other teams. If we had some more time we would be a bit further up.
From Brands Hatch we moved on to Silverstone and I was happy with
Silverstone. I was a bit annoyed at qualifying as I thought we could have got onto the second row but we got held up on a fast lap. Then again we got the bike ready and the first race it was ok but not quite right but we learned so much from the first race and put information into the second race. We were up to seventh position but got pushed wide by Tommy Hill and I went on the grass and lost two places so I ended up ninth. It was definitely better you know we are getting nearer to the front runner.
We made some changes to the bike for
Oulton Park, we got another engine and had a lot of work to do on gearing. Oulton Park is so complicated for gearing and you need to make sure it is dead right of course we have no data to work from so it was all guess work.
