Jack Valentine:
Nick and Stuart Simmonds have run a great team over the years, and they have a good bunch of guys there with them. They all like a laugh: I don’t think I’ve laughed so much for years! There aren’t any passengers in Nick and Stuart’s team, which is good.
Q:
So what can you do to help improve results?
Jack Valentine:
I wanted to get stuck in at
Knockhill and I’ve made lots of notes and bullet points about what could be improved a bit. The team is great and that’s a good base to work on, but I want to help the Isilon MSS Discovery Kawasaki team get some good results before the end of the season so they can work on things for 2008. I’m not jumping in feet-first, I’m looking at the team and how they do things. We just want to take it up another level. I’m not happy with third or fifth, I want to win - we all do - and we need to find the way to make that happen.
I’ve come from a difficult project with the Foggy Petronas team and it was good this weekend not to have any mechanical problems like we had with the FP team. So to have the bikes run faultlessly all weekend is a good base to build upon too. I want to get a few things 100% perfect in the team rather than everything 50% right. We need to be in a position so that eventually, everything is perfect so that the last link in the chain is the riders and then you can work on them. That’s what I’ve got to try and do to give the team the perfect launch-pad for 2008.
