It was a little unnerving because I was still learning the track, but now I had to learn it on a
MotoGP bike with God knows what horsepower and 19 of the best riders in the world around me. On my third lap, Carlos Checa passed me - then looked back, waving his fist, which p*ssed me off. Fair enough if I was deliberately in his road with five
minutes to go in qualifying, but it was nothing like that. Throughout the session, I was improving with every lap I did. I got eight in my first stint, the fastest being 1min 29.1secs, and ten in my second, getting down to 1min 27.3secs. Then, in my final seven laps, I managed a 1min 26.4, leaving me 3.4 secs off the fastest time.
I was pretty happy with that for the first outing. Having followed a couple of other riders during the session, I was surprised by the riding style of the 800s. I thought that the corner speed would be a lot higher. It was still high, but everybody’s riding style was definitely more based around picking the bike up and getting as much power to the ground as possible. After the session, I had a quick talk with my mechanics about what to change on the bike to make it more my own, but had no time for anything else as I was straight back out on my Supersport bike!
The Supersport qualifying session went fairly well. Having the extra hour of MotoGP practice to learn the track definitely helped, but it was very strange getting on the Yamaha 600 after the Ducati, as you can probably imagine! The two bikes are a long way apart in terms of riding position and massively different in terms of power. Even so, I know my Yamaha well enough that it didn’t take me too long to get back into it.
