Danny Kent “confirms” Yamaha chassis progress at Oulton Park BSB test

Although he counts Oulton Park among his “bogey tracks”, Danny Kent was able to draw positive conclusions from the official BSB test at the Cheshire circuit ahead of the opening round of the 2025 season.

Kent ended the test fifth-fastest, 0.931 seconds slower than Bradley Ray who topped five of the six sessions across the two days, but was relatively unconcerned by headline times.

“Oulton Park is one of my ‘bogey tracks’, so I’m just out there trying to improve myself, not really biting the screen going for an all-out lap time – I’ll save that for qualifying on the race weekend,” Kent told Crash.net between the second and third sessions at the Oulton Park BSB test.

“I feel good on the bike, that’s the main thing.”

Kent said that his objectives in Oulton Park had been to continue the confirmation work he was doing at the previous test at Donington about chassis setup for the season.

“The same as Donington, really, we’re just confirming the parts and the chassis stuff we wanted to test and making sure it works here and not just at Donington,” Kent said. “We’ve been able to confirm that.”

Part of the chassis specification Kent has been evaluating has been the 2025 Yamaha R1’s new wings versus the older specification fairing without them.

“We know we can go to round one and use the wings, we can go to round two and not use the wings,” Kent said.

“I thought it was that at the beginning of the year you had to homologate if you were going to use the wings and then you had to use them for the rest of the year, [but] that’s not the case this year.”

Kent indicated that he is not completely sure that the wings are a benefit in every circuit, but said that he could feel a benefit of them in certain areas of the Oulton Park layout.

“I found that the wings are helping me a bit around Oulton Park, mainly places like coming into the last corner: even though it’s a straight line, it’s quite bumpy and hilly and you get a lot of wheelie – I feel like I’m having to use less rear brake to keep the front wheel down.

“It’s definitely helping me here, but let’s say at Navarra, the first time using them, I didn’t feel that it was a benefit.”

A personal change for Kent for this season is the change from a thumb-operated rear brake to a scooter-style finger-operated rear brake.

“This year we’ve changed from the thumb brake to the scooter-style brake,” he said.

“Last year I felt like I was really putting a lot of force through it and I was still losing on exits.

“Mainly here, like over the brow [onto the start-finish straight], is where it starts to [and] wheelie I can put a bit more power and keep the front wheel down [using the scooter-style brake], so that’s definitely a benefit for this year.

“I feel like most of the things we’ve done this year have been a positive step forward from last year.”

Although even after only a few days of running the new scooter-style brake he could feel the benefits of the scooter brake over the thumb brake, Kent acknowledged that it was still a hard change to make.

“It’s difficult,” he said.

“Muscle memory is so strong that even on the second and third day at Navarra I was exiting the last corner and I was still going to grab the thumb [brake] and realising that it wasn’t there.

“I think with time it’s going to become more natural, and again with time the scooter-style brake is going to be my muscle memory and I’ll go straight to that.

“But I’m getting along with it quite well now.”

He explained that the idea to switch from thumb brake to scooter brake came at last year’s penultimate round at Donington.

“My reasoning was purely for the Donington Park races last year when I was following Kyle [Ryde],” he said.

“I was really fast in sectors one, two, and three, and then I’d lose everything in the exit of the two hairpins.

“I was putting it down to the rear brake, so that was my reason to switch this year."