On Saturday morning we raised the rear of the bike to put more weight on the front to try and get it to turn better. It didn’t change the bike at all so we put the rear back to how it was before and shortened the front again. I wasn’t getting big benefits from shortening the bike and it was making the bike worse in the hard braking corners like Redgate, Melbourne Loop and Goddard’s. We had tried just about everything to try and make it turn but nothing was making any big differences.
From Friday morning to Friday afternoon we improved 1.3 seconds, then from Friday afternoon to Saturday morning I was expecting at least another second after my first full day on the bike but I didn‘t go any faster at all. The rate of chassis improvement had really slowed up and in the afternoon I only managed to go a couple of tenths faster than what I did on Friday which wasn’t quite right. My best on the Aprilia in 2004 and last year was over 2.3 seconds faster than my best on the Honda so I knew where we had to find the time, it was just getting the bike right.
On Saturday evening my suspension man, Tim, told me that the shock I was using is set to Vincent’s preferences which as Ohlins put it "is
MotoGP hard". Apparently the valving in the shock I was using was rock hard because that is the way that Vincent likes it. We decided that for morning warm-up we would try the standard Showa shock that the team used to use with Smrz and set it to what they thought would be somewhere near for me.
