I got going pretty quick in the afternoon and immediately felt the improvement of the different gearbox. On my 3rd lap I went faster than I had in the morning. I came in the box after 4 laps and my mechanic changed the carburetion on the bike as it wasn’t particularly quick. On my 7th lap I got behind Porto and got a good tow off the back off him.
I caught him up as we entered the back straight and I got a good slip stream off him which is worth a lot on a huge straight like that. I passed him as we were coming on the brakes at the end of the straight. When I came across the line I went 9th with a 2.08.8. There was definitely room for improvement but I needed to find another slipstream which wasn’t going to be so easy.
The engine felt quite ok and I wanted a bit more feeling to the front end, as it was vague. We made a slight change and it was better but for the final 10-minutes I never found a good slipstream which made it hard to go faster. I came close but never improved on the lap I had behind Porto.
Even so I was very happy with the end result as I was at the head of the kit bikes and had a few factory bikes within reach. Also the chassis and the tyres were working well. We were improving the gearbox every time I got on the bike and I still wanted to change 1st and 2nd gear very slightly which we would try in morning warm up.
On Saturday night Martin and I again evaded any traditional Chinese Restaurant outings and stuck to the Italian which you can’t go wrong with. After eating I went on the internet to check the weather for race day and it read ‘70% chance of rain’. Most people had said that it was going to be wet and it looked pretty likely.
On Sunday morning the first thing I did was look out the window. It looked grey but it wasn’t raining. I wasn’t really too bothered whether it be wet or dry, I was quite confident we could get a good result in either conditions. We left for the circuit at 7.30am which gave us an hour before warm up.
