In the latest of his exclusive columns for Crash.net, Stobart Honda’s Michael Laverty talks about another difficult weekend at Oulton Park and chilling out at the North West 200 at his home in Northern Ireland ….
Hello there,
Well a lot has happened since my last instalment and I have to say Oulton Park didn’t go according to plan. It wasn’t a brilliant weekend, we struggled the whole weekend trying to find the set up and we just never really got anywhere. I finished with a tenth and eleventh and it was a bit of a struggle really, I wasn’t very happy and Michael Rutter my team-mate wasn’t happy either.
We were getting quite depressed with things as we had a bad weekend at
Thruxton and then a bad weekend at Oulton but we moved on from there and went to the Mallory test last weekend and started to get some positive results. I feel we are starting to turn things around with the bike and felt comfortable with it again like I did at
Donington. Hopefully we can turn it around coming into Mondello now and bring home some decent results again – it’s about time!
The problems at Thruxton were completely different to what we were experiencing at Oulton. Thruxton was a stability issue more than anything and at Oulton it was more of a steering thing, I just couldn’t seem to put the bike where I needed to put it. I was struggling over the rises even keeping the thing flat out, where as I was losing time where it was basically straight lines just got all the undulations to deal with, so it was strange things and I just couldn’t get the bike working the way I needed it to go any faster really.
We kinda hit a brick wall – not literally! But we just stayed at those lap times all weekend, but I needed to find another second at least and it was quite frustrating as Oulton is not a circuit I struggle around because I’ve had good results in the past but just couldn’t get the thing to work. It fried my head as the weekend went on.
