On Friday we were up at 7:30am to travel with the team to the circuit at 8:30am. The weather was quite bright but also a bit fresh on the lungs. It was warmer than last year though, last year it was proper cold! The first session was quite steady. I immediately felt the difference in the seat and the pegs. The seat was a great improvement in terms of getting tucked in the bike. Also the pegs felt a bit better in the way that it allowed me to open the angle of my legs a bit more and was less painful on the knees. The only thing that was a bit odd was that now the gear lever was about 2cm further away and was a bit easy to miss at first but I got used to it.
After the session had finished I was confident that what the team had done to the bike was a big improvement and with a bit more dry track time, things would start to come together. On this bike I’ve never really felt like I can brake like I have been able to in the past years. After the session I told the team that I wanted to try the bigger Brembo brake discs like I had been using for the last three years, but they didn’t have any. I remember in testing last year when I first tried the smaller discs I didn’t like them because they didn’t have the initial ’bang’ like the bigger discs have. As the team weren’t carrying these discs with them I went to the German 250cc team to see if they had any, but they didn’t, so I went to the French 250cc team and managed to blag a set off them which they weren’t using.
We put the discs on for first qualifying and the difference was noticeable straight away. I’m quite a hard braker and with the smaller discs I never quite knew where I was at and didn’t feel like I could consistently trail brake, but I felt much more confident with the bite of the bigger discs. We also dropped my bars by 10mm which helped to turn the bike, also another setting that I have used in the past years.
