I arrived at Steve’s place on Thursday night ready for the test day the next day. We packed up the vans with all the bikes and gear, and then Steve showed me how to change tyres, which was very useful. Steve also gave us our nice new motoacademy jackets, which I thought looked very cool.
Test day
We got to sleep in till about 7 and woke up to a beautiful sunny sky. During the test day we did some suspension drills. We put everything soft, everything hard, and then in the middle. I found that to be pretty good for me, the only issue I had was big head shakes when flipping left to right through turn 3-4. We made some adjustments which made it easier to cope with. From then on it was just about practice, practice, and practice. By the end of the day I felt like I was going much better than the last round.
Race day
This round 125s were up first so we were straight out for qualifying after the briefing. I felt fine on the short track after the test day yesterday, but having only ridden the new bit once before I spent most of the time trying to get my head around the new bit and qualified 5th with a time of 2.20.019.
We also went out in the superlite/pro twins qualifying, which was interesting to be out there with some bigger bikes and gave a chance to get some passing practice with bikes with more power, but less corner speed.
Race 1
I jumped the start a little bit, but stopped and started again. But the good news is that when I actually did get off the line I did a much better job than I have before. At the 1st turn I was only 5 to 10m behind the front runners. This shocked me a little and made me stuff up the first turn a little. I tried to hold on to them for as long as I could, but that didn’t last long. They pulled further and further away, and then I was just on my own for the rest of the race. My best time of the race was 2.12.325. That’s 2 seconds faster than last time we were on the long track. It felt a lot faster than that though!
Race 2
I managed to get another reasonable start, but made heaps of mistakes in the 1st lap, so I decided to just chill out a bit and not crash as I didn’t think there was anyone very close behind me. But James came around the outside of me on the exit of the last turn coming into the last lap, but then I bet him under breaks into turn 1 and put my head down and managed to get a little gap on him. That last lap made my whole race. It was the first time I had needed to actually fight for a position, and I loved it. With James around now and a similar pace, racing will be a lot more exciting for me.
Kyle and I went out in the second superlite race but had to start from the back of the grid. This was good for passing practice, because we had qualified a further up the grid than that. I was making good progress though the first part of the race, but then started making a few mistakes and didn’t get any further.
I had an awesome weekend, and learnt a lot on and off the bike. I’m feeling better every time I get out on the bike and cant wait to get out again. I’ve hardly noticed winter this year, I’m not sure if it has been better than last years winter (weather is kind of unavoidable in my job), but racing bikes seems to make everything else easy, because I’ve always got something to look forward to.
Thanks to Steve, Mike, VMCC, and everyone else out there.
Glen.
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Originally Posted by glice
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