On Wednesday my dad and I decided to take in a bit of local tradition and headed for the Grand Bazaar market in the old part of Istanbul. It’s a bit like a maze in there. Istanbul is built in the hills and the city centre is far from flat. It’s pretty wild in the market, they sell all sorts. Carpets, lamps, clothes and mainly just the old school traditional Turkish stuff. We wandered around there for a few hours until we’d had enough of getting hassled by the Turkish salesmen and navigated our way out of the market. There’s only one thing that me and dad were there for and that was a flying carpet like Aladdin’s but funnily enough no one seemed to have them!
On our way back over to the new part of the city centre we had to cross over the bridge and were shouted at and followed by this Turkish tramp for at least 20 minutes. I think his intention was to p**s us off enough so we'd give him some money… it almost backfired on him though because my dad was ready to slap him if he hadn’t walked away when he did!
On Thursday we went to the circuit in the early afternoon. When the team returned to Italy, after Qatar, my mechanics made the new seat section for my bike which I was well impressed with. On the Aprilia the sub frame and the seat is all in one and made out of carbon fibre, so they had to cut out the back of the seat and then bit by bit, bonded in the new carbon, waited for it to dry then did some more. All in all they managed to extend it by just over 5cm.
Also the team had managed to get a set of the extended footrest hangers off Aprilia, the ones which they had specially made for Simoncelli. Overall the bike was going to be a fair bit bigger and I was really looking forward to trying it. After doing a couple of laps of the track by scooter, sorting out my gear, taking my helmets to Arai and looking over the teams last year’s data we headed back to the hotel to have dinner and then hit the sack.
