We decided that I should sit out for a bit and then, once my team mate had finished, get the forks out of his bike and try them in mine as we didn’t have a spare set to try. At 4:30pm my team mate had finished and my mechanics swiftly nicked the forks out of his bike and got them into mine and I was back out on track at just after 5pm. It took me all of about………hmm…… 2 corners to realise that I’d been riding around on dodgy forks for the last 2 days and it felt so much better!
On my second lap I matched my best lap and on my third lap went faster. I did about 8 laps and went 1.3 seconds faster quite comfortably. It’s strange as when you ride around and the bike is behaving in a certain way for the best part of 2 days, when the problem is fixed, it’s tricky to get back into the normal rhythm. It was about 5:20pm when I got back to the pit box and decided that it was getting a bit cold to continue and now that we’d found the problem, we can start from scratch in
Jerez..
Me and the team were obviously well chuffed to have found the route of all evil that was causing me some worry and the mechanics stress for the last day and a half! I was still about 1/1.5 off where I wanted to be (Chaz was 22nd out of the 26 riders present, with team-mate Sekiguchi 0.8secs faster in 17th - Ed) but considering we’d changed my bike around a hell of a lot and not put it back to it‘s original settings, put my team-mate’s forks straight in without altering any of his settings and was on probably the most standard bike out there, I didn’t think it was too bad.
The most important thing was for me to get some kilometres in and work with the team which is a real pleasure! They were really on the ball when we were playing with the chassis and I feel really confident in them and they are real professionals.
