That was basically the trend of the weekend. With all the crashes I had pretty limited track time and managed to get onto the front two rows in both classes. The FX race was a disaster. I was struggling with harshness from the forks but we then found out some very useful information from Ohlins about how they had been modified from standard before we owned them. They were Jason Disalvo’s forks which he raced with at
Daytona. He was struggling and had some spacers put into the bottom of the forks. He obviously must have preferred it like this but it definitely wasn’t for me.
With this info coming to us only a few hours before the race we had to take a punt and make some big changes to try and give us some sort of direction. Our gamble didn’t work. Although the harshness was gone the setting was way too soft and because of it I ran off the track twice on the first lap! As soon as I hit the brakes, the front would dive rapidly, hit the bottom of the stroke and then pick the rear wheel up off the ground by what felt like a mile sending me straight on. For the rest of the race I pretty much just had to cruise and be as gentle on the brakes as possible. It was no fun at all. I worked up from 41st to 15th by the end of the race. My lap times were consistently 2 seconds slower than what I was doing in practice so I had to be sensible and bring it home.
The Supersport race wasn’t great, but at the same time wasn’t terrible after the weekend that I had had. It was a wet race and I got away quite well. I was just looking for a solid finish and didn’t feel I really stuck my neck out for the whole race. After a bit of a dice with Tommy Hayden, he got the better of me in the last laps and I finished up in 7th. Not a good result but it was decent points salvaged from a very tough weekend.
