In his latest update for Crash.net, rising 250GP star Chaz Davies reviews the season opening Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez, an event which the 19-year-old started on his ill-handling kit Aprilia before being handed his injured team-mate's machine...
After my final pre-season test at Jerez it was only just over a week before I was back on the plane to the same place for the first GP.
During that week there were a couple of press things to do but nothing too taxing and apart from that it went very quickly and before I knew it I was back in
Jerez.
My mum, dad and I went down to Stansted on Sunday night and stayed in a hotel because of the early flight at 7am the following morning. Stansted is one of the furthest airports for us, about 3 ½ hours. My record is 2 ¾ but I don’t know if my car would put up with that every time so Dad normally takes his.
It was an early start at 4:45am on Wednesday. We arrived in Jerez to some nice blue skies and sun, which was nice to see after 5 months of miserable Welsh border weather. We went straight to the circuit to say hi to the team and to visit a few faces that we haven’t seen since Valencia last year and that was about it for the day.
On Thursday I got all my kit ready. Arai had given me 2 newly painted helmets which were cool and I got another set of leathers and boots from M-Tech and W2. I talked to my chassis man Alessandro about where we were going to start with the setting because from 3 ½ days of testing we were still a long way off getting a base setting which I was happy with.
My forks had been to Öhlins in Sweden who had found a slight problem with them where the rebound damping was not working as it should have been, which would explain the front end bouncing problems I was having in testing which resulted in me having to use the old forks.
The first session of the year was on a wet but drying track after some rain the previous night. It was a bit of a pain because I really needed to properly test these forks and the rebound problem only comes when I push hard, which was impossible in the conditions.
