It's been a busy time for Foggy Petronas Racing rider Steve Martin and he's plenty to tell Crash.net in his latest column where he explains all about the latest developments on his bike, his races and even cigar-smoking, vodka-swilling lady taxi drivers...
It's been a while but when I think back,
Brands Hatch turned out to be a crucial race meeting really, not from a results point of view, although I was able to race in the points for both of the races before Abe took us out of race two with a very late braking manoeuvre.
The breakthrough at Brands came when my chief mechanic made some chassis changes that finally got rid of the chatter problem that I have experienced all year at certain circuits. In the second race at Brands I could actually feel what was going on with the bike and where my set-up was lacking, instead of just setting the bike up to get rid of the chatter.
It felt like a long time before I was able to get on the bike again, with the usual August break. We kept ourselves busy as usual and you can read more about that in my column on the FPR site. Whilst the break was okay, I am in Europe to race so I was glad when it was time to head off to Assen.
Assen for me has always produced mixed results, it's a circuit I like but I am still waiting for the time when I leave on Sunday night happy with the weekend.
The weekend started off well and my pace from the start was good and I managed to qualify on the second row again. With the times that I was able to do on race tyres I was confident that I would be able to have another two races in the points.
In the races my starts were okay, I didn't make or loose any positions and in race one I was in eleventh when I had a huge front end loss going into the corner after the new chicane. If you slowed down after every moment you have on Superbike it would be quicker to push the bike back to the pits, so I kept pushing hard. But when I lost the front again in the same spot I thought it was all over but amazingly it came back and I didn't crash.
