at least another ten per cent further. With the old internals, I was getting quite a bit of harshness and chatter, which was costing me a bit of time, but the new ones took the harshness away. I immediately knocked 0.6secs off my fastest time within a few laps and was getting into a good rhythm. I started to string a good few laps together and really started to click with the circuit. On about my sixth lap, however, the engine made a not so healthy noise across the start/finish line and I whipped the clutch in and coasted to a standstill. We decided that it wasn't a good idea to even attempt to get into the depths of the motor to resurrect it, and opted just get my forks and shock into the number two bike as fast as possible and get back out.
When my suspension was swapped and all my settings were transferred into the number two bike, I got back out on track and immediately noticed a drop in power to the stock bike. On top end, it was actually pretty good and wouldn't have been a great deal different to the number one bike, but where it lacked was in the grunt of the first four gears. To try and make up for the lack of acceleration, we lowered the gearing a bit and got it so it wasn't too bad but, obviously, it was still a bit dull off the bottom. After all, it was a road bike about four days previously and now it had just an exhaust, ignition and bodywork on it. My mechanic predicted that it was about 10hp down.
We only managed to do about another 15 laps in the afternoon because we were playing around with the number two bike, just trying to get it feeling right. It's funny that even two of exactly the same bikes always feel quite a bit different, even just the slightest things like different footpegs. Eventually, we got the number two bike pretty much as I wanted it to feel for the pace running at that point and, at the end of day two, I got down to a 1min 44.5secs, again very close to the fastest.
