30th April 2004 - Snetterton

After a miserable time at Cadwell where I struggled with my leg, my hand and the bike we moved on to Snetterton where I hoped things would be a bit easier due to having fewer corners so I wouldn't have to move around the bike so much. I have to admit that I wasn't looking forward to it as the forecast was for rain all weekend and I'd rather not race than risk injuring my knee at this stage in the proceedings.

I had booked the practice day to try to get my head in gear but having spent a too long on the dyno trying to fill in a major hole in the mid range I still needed to adjust my nose fairing and belly pan before I could go out on track. I had used some fairly thin aluminium strips to fit the nose fairing at Cadwell and they had collapsed fairly quickly so that instead of the nice aerodynamic shape all I was left with was a large flat sail on the front of the bike helping to slow me down. After scraping the belly pan all round Cadwell it was pretty crucial to adjust both items so I missed the first couple of sessions whilst I got it sorted.

Parked up in the garage.

Managed a quick wobble round before lunch and tried my hardest to remember where the track went and to try not to think about the problems I had at Sears last year. Nothing fell off the bike (including me) although it seemed rather daunting to think that I had once gone round over 12 seconds faster than I was doing at the time. The gearing seemed spot on at this stage and I was just getting in to the red when it was time to brake at the end of the back straight.

A couple of sessions after lunch saw me build my confidence a bit more and I even managed to get my knee down round Corams which was rather reassuring after all this time. The seemed to be working quite well which was a blessing as last year I was down on considerably down on power compared to the competition although after having one of the lowest outputs on the dyno at Cadwell I was still rather nervous about it. I managed to put in a few laps in the 1:27.xx bracket which I though was fairly reasonable as I wasn't pushing too hard before trying a variety of lines to avoid the bumps in to Riches in the final session when I managed to just sneak in to high 1:26.xx lap times.