“Two days of testing, we built the bike on the spot at the track, and the guys didn’t even sleep.  They worked all night.  We started testing but had many mechanical gremlins, tried to get the fuel maping right, tried to gel the motor, brakes, and everything.  We didn’t make any fast laps; just trying to learn the track and the bike.  And when the race weekend came we thought that the bike would be dialed in but we didn’t have many parts and we were a bit down on speed.  But the team was gelling really well.  It’s a great team, really fantastic.”

“But of course it rained and we only had one good bike so we sat out to not risk wrecking our good bike.  In the second session, I bedded in the brakes for two laps and then I crashed!  I’m not sure what the problem was, but the mechanics said it was something with the swingarm or something.  I didn’t get hurt but the bike was wrecked pretty bad.  And the next time we really got to ride the bike was Friday morning in the wet.  And that was fine.  I still didn’t want to crash the bike, but we managed to be 6th fastest in the wet.”

“We took our first dry laps in the afternoon, and we were very conservative and ended up deep in the grid.  We were quicker in the Saturday morning warm up, but still conservative.  During the first race the setup was a bit wrong for the dry/wet conditions.  We ended up finishing 12th across the line, but 16th in aggregate.  We learned alot in the race, but for the second race we had a mechanical right at the start and didn’t get to race.  But we expect to have good parts by the Valencia test and for the Philip Island race.”

“Overall, it’s so nice to be back in World Superbike.   The compettion level is great, there are 20 guys out there really going fast.  And being back here with them had me smiling.  Even when we were having a tough day, I was happy”

Keep it on two.