I find it difficult doing stuff like that, because having spent most of my life on the tarmac, I’m used to having the throttle flat stick and with that it’s more about being controlled and constant with the throttle and your very rarely wide open. And also I was standing up 80% of the time as you get a bit more feel to the bike and that was very different but good.
We arrived in Brno on Wednesday early evening and went to the hotel early. On Thursday I did the normal routines and had a bit of a chat with the mechanics to find out what they’ve been up to in the break. My one mechanic and my team boss Dieter did a bungee jump which looked awesome from the pictures.
I had pretty good hopes for the weekend, Brno is a track that I really enjoy and last year went good there all weekend right from the start. From the first session I knew that this year would be a bit harder though.
Some circuits we can just turn up and the setting is more or less there or thereabouts and we change very little over the weekend which was the case last year at Brno and a few times this year. This year with the newer chassis it seems to be more consistent but it didn’t feel good in the first session.
We made slight changes throughout the session but there was no dramatic improvements. In the middle of the corner the bike was drifting wide and was much harder than normal to be accurate with the bike. At the end of the session I was 15th on a 2mins 6.9secs.
For the afternoon we had a few ideas to try and improve the chassis but it was much the same as the morning. I followed a few riders and on the entry to the corner - we were very similar and my bike was turning in very well but when I wanted the bike to hook around in the middle of the corner and really turn it wouldn’t and I was losing valuable time on the exits.
At the end of the session I was 17th, on a 2min 6.0secs with very little improvement to the chassis over the morning.
For Saturday morning I had a good chat with my chassis mechanic about possible solutions because at the moment we weren’t improving the bike like we needed to be. Two years ago I had a similar problem at Brno which we cured by pushing the forks up through the yolks, taking weight off the front. I decided I wanted to try this and see if it helped.
