9th May 2001 - Rockingham

The weekend before Rockingham was spent giving my bike a bit of an overhaul. First off I had to remove the fork leg and drill out the broken pinch bolt from my Snetterton 'incident'. This was followed by replacing all the pinch and caliper bolts with new ones and tightening just about everything to the correct torque rather than just as tight as I could get it. An oil change proved a bit more complicated when I realised that the extra large radiator would have to be drained before I could get access tot he oil filter. Finally the bike got a bit of a clean as it was starting to look a bit of a mess.

As a circuit Rockingham is going to be an awesome track. Unfortunately at the moment it is a building site to the point where the track was rather dirty with no rumble strips and just mud in place of the usual gravel, etc. Even the roads leading up to it were still being built let alone the rest of the facilities. The Oval circuit was still being finished so we used one of the inner circuits, the 'National' one I think, which is very technical and will make for some close racing when I go there in June.

I've done the California SuperBike School before and always find it very useful. Each time I come away with something else to concentrate on. I was hoping whatever I picked up this time would help improve my confidence which had been flagging badly prior to the Snetterton round. My instructor was Paul Debnam who I had met before after he kindly helped me out with some pointers at the recent Brands Hatch race.

The school format is to break the day in to five sections, each one consisting of a classroom briefing followed by an track session to put the theory in to practice. All didn't start well however as the temperature on my bike was jumping around a lot so I couldn't concentrate on the exercise or really learning the circuit as I was wondering what I had done wrong when working on it the previous weekend. Turned out to be some rather large air locks in the coolant system which were soon fixed by topping up the radiator with the engine running to circulate the water, followed by hastily putting the radiator cap back on before the temperature got too high.

The next three sessions went fairly quickly and despite being fairly nervous I gradually improved my times as my confidence levels increased. It was still fairly nerve racking and despite trying to relac on the bike I soon had aching hands and shoulders from gripping the bars too tightly. Funnily enough one of the lessons was to make you relax by flapping your arms like a chicken whilst riding round. it sounds really silly and certainly looks odd buty it really shows how tense you are even when you don't feel it.

The fifth, and final session, was marred by a flat battery just before the start so the first fifteen minutes of the session were spent changing it. I managed to get out but only did two laps before the only off track excursion of the day curtailed the session. Needless to say I didn't get to practice that lesson very much.

I'm still very nervous but the biggest thing I picked up all day was having the confidence to roll on the throttle in the corners a lot more. Previously I had been very nervous about doing this as the bike felt a little unstable - Rolling on the throttle certainly helped from that point of view. Just before I left the very nice man from Dunlop did me a deal on some D208GP tyres (a replacement for the D207GP*) which were fitted before I left.