Mark Hanna - Pembrey/Snett Weekend

Team traction control set off to Pembrey for a couple days testing; in the three days off since Snett, we put the bike on the Dyno to work with the traction settings, and were not surprised to find that it had very little TC map in it. So we worked on the map setting for the wet and a complete new dry map setting, finding another 10bhp just with the fueling. We got to Pembrey on friday eve, weather did not look so bad, but as soon as we opened the curtain in the morn the damp was there and stayed all day !! we started with the complete wet set up that we ran at Snet in the 3 hour race practice . Keith was liking what he felt below him, but also made a comment that the bike felt so different; which i was ready for as it was mapped so different now using the bazzaz box. Keith started to play with the traction settings and we were starting to get a good understanding of how it worked in the wet. As the day got dryer, but not enough for slicks, we put the intermediates on which Keith really liked as he could feel the bike moving around on them. As the day moved on we ended up on slicks but the damp just never really went away so we called it a day with one session remaining. Keith got a good feel for the circuit and knew himself that if saturday was dry he had a lot of hard work to get through with mike edwards.

Day two was dry and sunny, and the boys went out in the first session with full dry settings in. It took a while for Keith to get his head around the track as there is two real big balls turns, one near just roll off in top and straight back on again and one big left hander that a lot of riders take as 3 turns but it is actually one big fast left., sweep in , sweep out and back in again , it’s a fast old place and it took us most of the day to get Keith feeling comfortable enough to attack the track, we tweaked the settings a little, but it was mostly tweaking Keith’s head to open the throttle early and braking later. But by the end of the day i was peaking with Keith’s performance, we did a total of 188 laps and by the end of it he was a lot happier with things. For me we had a great test with rider and machine, Keith loved the power of the bike and the handling of it.

Day 3 seen us back to Snett; i counted maybe 80 bikes in Keith’s first session, so said it would be hard to get a better setting than what we already had. And it would have been a bit too dangerous to try anything to get a faster set up on the bike, so we made a few small adjustments with less traction; which Keith did not like the feeling of from the rear; and we used a harder tyre SC 2 rear which worked fantastic as we had SC 1 for the race which was just a bit to soft for endurance racing. Keith used the rest of the day as a bit of a test for getting closer to other riders on track and passing them straight away, not thinking about it just doing it. Then him and neevesy fucked about for the rest of the day, pulling each other on. All in all we had another very successful few days on track and i really believe Keith is learning more about technical set up and bike control every time he throws his leg over the bike.

Mark Hanna