I got out at about 12pm and immediately noticed that whatever Aprilia had found with the forks wasn’t the real problem and I still had the trail-brake bouncing just as I had had in Barcelona. I ran in new pistons and did about 8 laps before I stopped and we put in the spare forks that the team had collected whilst back in Italy between the tests. They were a definite improvement over the dodgy set but still not great.
These forks were the factory type fork from ‘98, which is all very well but things have moved on a bit in the last 8 years with the evolution of tyres and the tyres working with suspension etc. We had to make the most of it because it is all we had but it was definitely going to be uphill! For the first day we played around with the bike and we got it feeling better but still not right.
I was really struggling to turn the bike in the last half of the tight corners, and we couldn’t get rid of a harsh vibration that was coming in the fast corners. After more tinkering from the mechanics I was feeling happier in the tighter corners and the bike was now turning better. At the end of the day I was way off with a 1min 47.8secs, and more worrying was that it felt like hard work to even get that time! Last year in testing I did a 1min 45.4secs which there was no way I was getting near.
On Wednesday we made some overnight changes which improved my feeling slightly. I was complaining about the harsh feeling from the front end in the fast corners which we spent all afternoon working our way around but not really getting any benefits from any chassis or suspension change. By 4pm in the afternoon I was getting a bit annoyed from not getting any improvements whatsoever with the changes we were making and the bottom line being that the lap times were just not fast.
I had done a 1min 46.8secs and felt that at most I could probably do a 1min 46.3/1min 46.4 but I didn’t think it was worth the risk to try and get from 22nd to about 19th or 20th. The mechanics had tried everything, and I mean everything! They are really switched on and from just two tests with them I have a lot of faith in them which is a plus point!
In the end I asked my team mate, Taro, if he’d like to try my bike. He was going very fast on his bike, doing a 1.44.8 in about 8th at the time and I thought it would be worth getting him to try my bike to see what he reckoned - as long as he didn’t go out and stick it in the '45s on his first lap! After he tried it he confirmed what I was moaning about, the harshness of the front forks.
I was relieved he backed me up and then I went out and did 3 laps on his bike to get a feel for myself what things should feel like. It felt good, nice and smooth and generally felt like you could just push it on that bit harder. After that we tried to go more in the direction of his bike, but it didn’t make a great deal of difference. Again, I put the problem down to the forks, they are just a bit too out of date and causing all sorts of problems for us.
