FPR rider Steve Martin did not have the weekends he wanted with the Corona Extra World Superbike championship rounds at Monza and Silverstone.
Away from the track, Steve's been finding plenty of excitement too as he tells us in his exclusive Crash.net column.
This could be the shortest column I have written yet as the Monza and the Silverstone race meetings have been a bit of a nightmare for me really.
We headed into Monza with a new stage of engine development and some different chassis settings that I wanted to try but the weekend ended up being a total wipe out. We didn’t really achieve anything due to the reliability issues we were having and I didn’t get to test any of the chassis settings I would have liked, to try and improve the rear grip issues from Valencia.
Just before Silverstone we tested a new electrical system at
Mallory Park and the test seemed to go well, the bike was a lot better under brakes and really it seemed that with a bit of fine tuning at Silverstone we could be heading in the right direction.
After meeting some of the FPR fan club members at the workshop the weekend before Silverstone, I was hoping for a good result at the team’s home circuit. I went out in the first session with the exact same bike and settings that I was using at Mallory Park but the bike felt completely alien with fuelling and chatter problems. Over the weekend we made changes to the chassis but all I could feel was the chatter.
What is it with me and last laps? I wish I knew as I have lost count how many times my bike has stopped on the last lap in the last couple of years. Okay I was only in fourteenth this time but I really wanted those points! The team had solved the reliabity issues from Monza so, of course, the mechanical failure in race one was the five cent part.
After making some changes to the set up in-between races I went back out on the same bike for race two and, although I finished out the points, I set my quickest lap of the weekend and I got some feeling back from the bike and hopefully some direction.
