That is one of the things you have to be able to do to be good. You inevitably get problems because you are pushing on these things so hard, that is not to say that these things are not designed well enough to cope with the tasks they are being used for, but things inevitability break and when they do you have to be able to repair them very quickly. That goes all the way through the bike, from being able to take the fairings off quickly to being able to diagnose problems with the electronics.
Weight saving is a very important part of what we do. A Superbike has to weigh 162 KG at the end of the race. You are allowed 1% underneath that for degradation in tyres, tyres wear out so they are much thinner at the end of the race and therefore lighter, and the bikes will lose a bit of water and a bit of oil. So we are allowed the 1% which makes it in actual fact a limit of 160.5-ish KG. We have to ballast our bike to get it UP to that weight limit, otherwise it would be underweight. If your bike is found to be underweight by the organisers at the end of a race then you are thrown out and you lose your points.
What we did this year was very simple and effective but perhaps not desirable, in order to make the bike heavy enough we added fuel. In the old days the rules used to state that the bikes were weighed without the tank, now days it is as the bike crosses the finish line.
So if you put an extra three litres of fuel in at the beginning of the race, roughly speaking you'll have an extra three KG at the end of the race, it just guarantees you'll be up to the weight limit. The down side of that is that where the fuel is carried in the tank at the beginning of the race, you have a lot of fuel high-up.
That is not very good for vehicle dynamics. It makes the bike top heavy, where the aim is to centralise the mass as much as possible by getting the weight as near to the centre of gravity as possible.
