On Thursday, when the sun had been out for an hour and created a bit of heat, we took to the track at about 11:15am. We started with the settings that I had finished with on Wednesday. When I was running in new pistons for the first few laps I could tell straight away that the fork spring hadn’t really made much difference to how the bike was behaving, which was a bit worrying.
After 15 or so laps I had gone ˝ second faster than the previous day but was still about 2 seconds off where I thought I should have been. I was at the barrier where breaking the 1.52 was a struggle. I had done a 1.51.8 but I thought that to go any faster something would have to be seriously different. At the GP last year I qualified on a 1.49.0, I didn’t expect to beat that, as the bike is more standard than what I was riding last year, but I at least expected to get within 1 second of it.
This puzzled me quite a bit and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried! I knew that it was the first test, whereas everybody else had already had at least 1 test, but normally within half a day I can be straight back on the case after a winter off. So, we played around with the front of the bike in a hope of stumbling across a setting which would allow me to trail the brakes into the turns much more than I was currently able to do.
Nothing was really making much difference and we changed absolutely everything! Harder, softer, more preload, less preload, more rebound, less rebound, lengthened the bike and shortened it, opened and closed the angle of the front forks but nothing made any difference what so ever. When it got to about 3pm we were all scratching our heads.
My chief mechanic, Luca, suggested that maybe there was still something wrong with the forks. I was a bit unsure, because they had been serviced by Ohlins the previous evening and they had just found the bent spring.
