Saturday really didn’t improve much. The team were still experimenting with many different things on the bike, particularly ignition and electronics. I broke down twice in the morning, again from very small issues and we were struggling to get any speed out of the bike, especially under acceleration in the first four gears. I was about 20 kph down on top speed and we were looking for a solution to try and half that speed difference to the factory bikes.
For final qualifying we managed to get an extra few K’s out of the bike making it around 16/17kph down from the fastest. We then left the engine at that and quickly realised that we had made very little chassis improvements during the weekend because of spending more time in the pits than out on track. But, this is why a development bike is called a development bike, things have to not work or not function how you‘d like at some point.
We began to work on the chassis side of things and generally stiffened things up a bit but had nowhere near enough time to test things that we would have liked to test. I qualified way down, exactly where I don’t remember. I know it was too far down towards the bottom of the paper for my liking! Even about 10 minutes before the race I found myself thinking 'Shit, I better check where I am on the grid because I haven’t got a clue!'
Sunday morning was basically as we had left the bike on Saturday. We made a couple of chassis mods but to no avail. Speed wise we were still over 15k’s down but knew it wasn’t going to improve so the team didn’t try to force the engine any further. I didn’t have the slightest idea what tyres to use as the most consecutive laps that I’d done on a set had been about seven! The whole bike was a gamble going into the race. We altered the suspension a bit and I used a rear tyre that I hadn’t even used before because of the increase in temperature compared to the previous days.
