After the session my chassis mechanic and I had a chat about exactly what the bike was or wasn’t doing and we came up with a solution to try for Saturday. We were going to put 1 harder spring in the front forks and alter the swing arm pivot position so that there is more weight on the rear and less weight on the front because at the minute there was too much weight on the front and it was hard to stop and pushing wide.
On Saturday morning I felt the change while running in new pistons. The session went a whole lot smoother than the Friday did and I felt like were starting to get somewhere with the bike, and I like that feeling!
I did a consistent run near the end of the session all in the mid 1min 54secs and the fastest being a 1min 54.3secs which put me inside the top ten at the time and at the end of the session was 14th.
The bike was much better but I still wanted a bit more stability on the brakes so we decided in the afternoon qualifying that we would try the hard front tyre as it has stiffer sidewalls which cope better when heavy on the brakes and doesn’t give a mushy feeling.
In the afternoon I immediately liked the feeling of the tyre on the brakes because it was more stable, but was unsure about it when hard cranked over. I caught Locatelli and did 1min 55.0secs on my 5th lap which had already improved my qualifying time and he was holding me up.
I don’t want to whinge, but his bike was an absolute missile, I thought mine was going OK until I got with him, it was a joke! I stopped in the pits and told my chassis mechanic how the hard tyre felt and I said I wanted to give it a bit more of a test. With a new rear tyre on I went back out and on my 2nd lap I lost the front in the 2nd corner.
It went very easily and the bike was too badly damaged to get back on. That was the session over for me with 30 minutes to go and I knew that I was going to be well down on the grid.
