Towards the end of first qualifying my team-mate, Taro Sekiguchi crashed and as a result broke his femur. He has no luck at
Jerez at all. On exactly the same day, March 24th last year and at a similar sort of time in the day, he completely blew apart his knee and broke his leg by clipping a bit of curb that was sticking out. This meant that his bike would be free for me to try and if I liked it, use it for the rest of the weekend. I was still unconvinced about my bike, although the forks were better I still felt that - for the lap times that I was doing - the bike was way too nervous and I have never known a bike be so difficult just to try and get some sort of base setting!
For second free practice on Saturday morning I started on my bike to test the changes that we had made. It felt better, not good, but better. I could now turn a bit harder in the tighter stuff but still had the nervousness in the quicker corners which so far we have been unable to get rid of at all. After about 15 minutes I tried Taro’s bike. My mechanics had set it with my extended bars and what they thought would be a general setting for me and it immediately felt pretty good. It didn’t have the nervousness of my bike and I started doing quicker lap times within a few laps.
We continued improving and I was getting a bit more confident. It was nice to start seeing myself on the first page of our timing screens where I hadn’t been all year. I ended the session in 18th, obviously not ideal but did a 1min 46.6 as opposed to Friday’s 1min 48.4 and was feeling reasonably comfortable. I was feeling much better about myself for final qualifying, I’d now had a glimmer of hope that things were starting to improve because it was starting to get tough.
