7th April 2001 - Snetterton

After my poor performance at Brands I decided to give in to my nagging doubts and get the suspension checked over by someone who knows what they are doing. Took it to MH Racing down in Chippenham who had done some good work on my road bike a couple of years ago. His first comment on bouncing the bike up and down was "How do you manage to ride this thing without falling off?". Ah, that might explain a few things ;-)

Turns out that the bike was still set up for Glen Richards who, unlike just about everyone else in the 600cc SuperSport paddock, likes his bike setup so it is almost rock solid. My crashes at Lydden could well have been caused by the forks locking up after the first two thirds of their travel. That coupled with the rear end that was so hard it may as well not have had a shock on it summed things up.

Nothing a day with Mark Hammond couldn't sort out though. I collected a totally transformed bike - It had new fork springs, new shims, a totally rebuilt rear shock plus a different weight spring on the back. I simply unloaded the bike from the van and collected it the same way. None of this having to strip it all down myself and send the bits off to someone I don't know the other end of the country.

Arrived at a cold Snetterton at some unearthly hour of the morning for the TDT Motorsport track day. By some miracle there wasn't a cloud in the sky despite the forecast for rain. Signed on for the advanced group despite never having seen the track before. It would have been nice to stay in the intermediates and play with some of the guys from work who had come up with me but I needed to concentrate as I'll be racing here in a couple of weeks.

The first session was a bit of a nightmare and I would have been quite happy to give up and go home at that point. Nothing seemed to be working although it was more in my head than anything else as the new suspension put up with a lot of grief where previously it would have just thrown me off. I was also still very worried about my shoulder - I've done enough physiotherapy to get most of the movement back but I had absolutely no strength in my arm or upper back. Every time I tried to lean off the bike I would find myself just sliding round and having to hang on to the bars to keep myself upright. Obviously hanging off was going to be interesting if I couldn't actually hang on ;-)

I needn't have worried as the next few sessions progressed much better as I started to learn the circuit. Having a lap timer helped me gauge how things were going but with the best will in the world there is no way I can blame my lack of pace on my shoulder injuries. The biggest problem was that my head still couldn't deal with the fact that the I wasn't going to lose the front end again. Although quite happy to use the power on the straights, where it could just about hang on to the back of the various R1s & FireBlades, I was braking much harder and earlier than I needed to so I could just potter round the corners. Not a good situation to be in.

Overall the morning went okay, I learnt where most of the corners went and had a fun few laps with an instructor. Despite his Triumph TT600 having a blueprinted engine and a race exhaust it was quite easy to open up a significant gap down the straight ;-) More importantly the suspension worked really well with only one minor slide getting on the power a bit early coming out of the second chicane and hitting that interesting section coming out of the dip in the power band.

The afternoon was a bit of a non event. I have booked up for a couple of days at the European SuperBike School and was due to have an assessment with one of their instructors after lunch. We got to do three laps straight after lunch on cold tyres which really didn't help my state of mind. We were told not to go too quickly down the straight so I quite happily went around at little more than half speed before coming in for a chat. On being told I should aim to join the level intended for track novices I naturally complained some what so we arranged another session.

Tried to go a bit harder the second time out only to run out of petrol coming on to the Revett straight. I was almost out of the seat when it started coughing and spluttering going round the corner so I was quite happy to push the bike off the track and watch the rest of the session from there. After filling up with fuel I tried again - Unfortunately it then started to rain so I did my assessment wondering whether the Dunlop D207GP* were going to work okay or whether I would find myself on my backside again. A bit unfair on the instructors really as they had to judge my ability based on my injured state rather than the sort of pace I know I am capable of when I am fit and well. Guess I'll have to get down the gym pretty quickly to get back in the swing of things.

No sooner had we returned to the pits than the rain arrived big style. In the space of a few short minutes we had heavy rain, hail stones and even more rain. As the rest of the afternoon progressed it just rained harder and harder. As each assessment had effectively taken up a whole session I only managed six or seven laps before it was time to go home.

Despite managing to improve from the 1:44 second laps I was putting in at the start of the day I only managed to get it down to a best of 1:33.35 - A reasonable improvement given I only managed twenty six laps spread over what amounts to half a day on a new track. Unfortunately the front guys in the Rookie Championship have been putting in 1:19 laps so I obviously have a lot of work to do.