Friday morning dawned warm and sunny and we felt confident of a good showing after setting the bike up in spain. However it soon became clear that the smooth Spanish track was far different from Brands Hatch and the bike was far too soft both front and rear over the bumps. I came in and we gave it two clicks of compression and it made no real difference, we then gave it two more and two turns of preload but again it made no difference. By now the suspension was getting out of its optimum range so we decided the springs would have to be changed for 1st qualifying. The session ended with a laptime of 1.36.7 putting me in 14th position, 1.8 seconds off the quickest time set by Luke Jones. I was confident that there was allot of pace to com once we had sorted he gearing and suspension settings.
We made the changes and fitted the first of our three sets of allocation tyre's for first qualifying. We had seen the weather forecast for Saturday and it said it would be freezing cold and possibly snowy. This meant that this would probably be the session that set the grids for Sundays race. To begin with I wasn't totally sure that we had gone the right way as the bike didn't really feel like it was loading up the suspension at all. I started to push harder and it started to work better.
There are 58 registered riders for 600 Superstock and this means that getting any clear track time was a nightmare. After 7 laps I upped the pace that shot me into ninth position from nowhere with a lap of 1.35.5. I was feeling comfortable and was sure there were big chunks of time to come in the next few laps. I went past a group of two or three riders into Hawthorns and by Stirlings I had caught another. I could see that there was nobody in front of him so decided to get past him on the way into Clearways and hopefully have a few clear laps. I didn't brake massively later than before but for some reason best known to myself went down an extra gear than normal. This locked up the rear wheel and generally unsettled the bike, and resulted in me going very wide and eventually crashing on a dirty bit of track when almost round! This was a bit of a nightmare situation and i was angry at myself because it was a silly crash not caused by going to fast. The marshall told me that they were understaffed and could not get me back to the pits and the spare bike so all I could do was watch myself slip down the order to 16th. We would have to pray for some dry track time tomorrow....!
Saturday morning was dry although our session wasn't until late afternoon. As our time neared we dared to hope that we would get away with it ....WRONG!!! Literally 5 minutes before our session it started raining, which then turned to serious hail..... This combined with very low temperatures meant it would be impossible to improve qualifying times and I would start from 16th on the grid for Sunday race. It was a good opportunity for me to have my first decent test on the Metzeler wets and I was right on the pace with about 6 of us within a second. Joel Morris put in a stonking lap but I really hadn't taken any chances and I'm fairly confident of my wet pace when it matters. One thing we did notice was that the suspension was still bottoming right out. This caused us to wonder whether it was just doing it over the big bumps at Surtees and Sheene curve and then not working properly for the rest of the lap. t might be that these bumps are something that we would have to sacrifice for the overall setup as they weren't really slowing me down.
Race day was Sunday and I couldn't believe it when we awoke to a few inches of snow and literally blizzard conditions. It was only forecast for sleet later in the afternoon. Not this at half past 7 in the morning! It carried on snowing and the only things we accomplished was for the team to drink tea and watch world Superbikes on the telly! The meeting was finally cancelled at about eleven o'clock and we headed home. It was still snowing at Brands at 3 in the afternoon. Ironically as soon as we left, before even the M25, it had stopped and there was not a flake of snow on the ground! Somebody doesn't want BSB to succeed this year!
The meeting was immediately re-scheduled for the 10th/11th May with the grids standing from the first qualifying, so it looks like I will have to contend with 16th on the grid at least once this year...This is the weekend before the Northwest 200 so it will provide the team with a logistical challenge. next up is Thruxton on the 18th/19th/20th April where hopefully we might get some sunshine and NO snow. ...