Friday was a big battle with the chassis. For the morning free practice session I had my new M-Tech leathers which were very comfortable. It’s the first time I’ve had a set of made-to-measure leathers that fit perfect from the first cut. The only problem was that because the leather was new it was very slippery and I had to keep holding myself from slipping on the bike for the first session and didn‘t have time to put it right so I had to wait until the session was over.
For the afternoon we put a bit of sand paper on the tank to stop me slipping and also rubbed sand paper on the ass of the leathers just to take the slippery edge off them which helped. All through the session I was struggling to hold the line half way through the tighter corners on the circuit.
I followed a few riders and I could enter the corner on the same line as them at the same speed which was no problem and mid-way through the corner they could turn their bike tight and stand it up and get on the gas, whereas I was fighting to try and get my bike to hook around the last part of the corner and I was drifting out wide.
At the end of first qualifying I did a 1.45.9 which was about the same that I did in the test two weeks previous, but there seemed to be a wall stopping me from breaking that high 1.45 barrier. We needed to look at the chassis in order to gain time but each change that we made didn’t improve the bike. I finished the session obviously not happy with 18th and struggling to make the bike handle better.
For Saturday the wind had really picked up. It was extremely windy and at the first and second corner it was like a sandstorm. They say that the sand was coming from the Sahara Desert and the times were about 1-1.5sec off the previous afternoon. Obviously, given the conditions, it was going to be difficult to get anywhere near the previous days times. If I wasn’t already struggling with the chassis I was even more so now with all the wind which was pushing everybody wide.
