Luckily I spotted Ian Edwards (team manager of the TSR team a couple of years back) at the front of a huge queue and snuck in with him to avoid queuing. We went through the flights with the lady at the desk and all they could offer was a flight at 4.45pm the following day into Seville. Not very handy considering I was due to be out on the bike at 11am ish!
They had 4 spaces left so we decided to pre-book 2 of them, just in case we couldn’t find anything else. I got back on the internet and could find absolutely nothing for that evening and the best I could get was a 10am flight to Seville the following day which meant that by the time I’d got to the track, I’d miss at least half a days testing and we were already way behind.
Then mum rang me back, and typically, using the mum’s power had gone one better, finding a flight from Gatwick at 7am the following morning. I got booked on to it and drove down to Gatwick that night, stayed in a hotel and dad was keeping his Seville flight so he was then going to drive back to Stansted the following morning.
On Wednesday morning I was up at 5:15am, got to Gatwick airport and thankfully there were no more cancellations. The flight was with BA and had about 15 people on it! I got into Seville at about 10:30am and was picked up by 2 of my mechanics, Luca and Marco. By the time I’d got to the track I’d only missed about 1 hour of track time which wasn’t too bad. I was still riding the 'bitsa', the same bike as in Catalunya as there had been no news on the financial side of things for the team. My dodgy forks had been given to Aprilia and they checked them and found one small problem with them, but to be fully checked they needed to go back to Italy and on the Fork dyno which wasn’t possible in between the two tests.
