For the afternoon we didn’t make any improvements in the right direction with the bike so it didn’t get any better. It wasn’t too bad the way it was, but there were a couple of things like holding the line that I thought could be improved but we never managed to find them...
For Saturday I woke up with a sore throat and didn’t feel particularly good. That’s the problem when you go to a hot country, it’s tempting to have the air-con on flat out but the problem is, you get hot and then, all of a sudden go in the cold and as a result get ill from it.
The same thing happened to me in Malaysia a couple of years ago and since then I’ve always been a bit careful but my team-mate had the air-con on flat out in the office bit where we get changed and also in the car, and I ended up with the cold!
In free practice 2 in the morning we again fiddled around with the set-up to see if we could get a bit more out of the chassis but it seemed like what we started the weekend with was not too far away and hard to improve. With 15-minutes to go we put in a new rear tyre and we seemed to have made a slight step forward with the chassis.
I did a 2min 10.8secs on my second lap and was again on another blue helmet lap. I tipped into the double right, turn 8, and the front folded in what felt like slow motion but it was about a 90mph crash. The bike was a bit worse for wear but luckily I just slid and there were no injuries.
I felt even worse again after the morning session, probably to do with the crash, but I started getting hot and cold sweats and just felt shakey. In the afternoon there were a few small wrong things at the start of the session like an odd foot peg, and the brake and clutch lever in the wrong position that we got right. But I didn’t feel right all session and I felt a bit powerless. I ended up 20th on the grid but knew that I was capable of more so I was just hoping for a good start and to get stuck in.
