On Monday and Tuesday there was a track day going on at the circuit. On Tuesday I took Barry’s 125cc out which was very funny! He has a 2002 Aprilia and Mark is working his way around setting it up as he only has Honda 125cc experience which is a completely different tool. The Aprilia is a real temperamental bike and takes a lot of time to get the knack of so he wanted me to go and try it out to see how close it was. My finger was well and truly covering the clutch, just waiting for the dreaded sound! It actually felt pretty good. It been five years since I last rode a 125 and it was damn good fun just throwing them into the corner and weaving my way in and out of the track day guys. I probably looked absolutely ridiculous on it. You don’t see many 6ft guys riding 125s! In six laps I was three seconds off the lap record with loads of traffic to work my way through which I thought was pretty decent. With a few hours on the bike I reckon the record wouldn’t have been too difficult to get.
The rest of the week was pretty steady. I went running down the road out of the circuit a couple of times and generally didn’t get to see much but the circuit. The weather was about as good as it had been since we had been there, but by looking at the forecast it again looked pretty poor for the weekend. On Thursday the AMA run practice for all classes but the factory teams are not allowed to take part. It’s quite a good idea but works strange in some ways, for example, Josh Hayes won the Formula Extreme Championship this year ahead of all the Factory Yamahas. They say he’s not on a factory bike but some people say it basically is a factory bike. It hasn’t got Honda written all over it but its got Honda’s best inside it… it’s a tricky one to work out. Practice went OK, the lap times weren’t anything special and there were no transponders on the bikes, but I was one of the quickest out there.
On Thursday night I had to make the decision which bike I was going to use in which race. Like I said before, they are both Supersport eligible but you are not allowed to use the same bike in both classes. I thought that I could go faster on the ‘06 bike than I could on the ‘05 so I wanted to use the ‘06 in Supersport because apparently if you get a result in that then it is more significant and noticed more by the people who count. I made that decision, but had not ridden both bikes on the same day, only on different days, so it was hard to really tell the better bike of the two. They both had strong points and weak points.
