MRO Round 7and 8 Snetterton 2nd - 3rd July

Friday testing

Testing, so on to our second worst track. In fact snetterton is quite an enjoyable circuit but its just so hard to go fast when you don’t have a fast bike. I had some new tyres to try from Dunlop (d209’s) which we were hoping would be as good if not better than our usual kr364’s.
I ran in the bike for the first couple of sessions then switched over to the d209’s for the remainder of the day……
Amazing! I can’t believe we’ve been messing around with kr364’s for so long when you can ride on the d209’s and have just as much feel without the constant sliding around you get from wrecking your tyres within 8 laps on the old 364’s. These tyres offer great grip, ok the front is a little unstable at times but I enjoy that sort of thing anyway cos the bike feels lively. I had a few movements at the rear which I needed to let me know where the limit was. Over all you get the same great Dunlop feel and grip as you come to expect, but these tyres feel like riding on slicks!
Anyway after 4 sessions we noticed that we’d cracked a cylinder head. We replaced it and missed one session but made it out for the last session. All went reasonably to plan.

Saturday

In warmup the bike seemed a little slow but I thought it was just because of the humidity being up.

Qualifying,

Qualifying went ok and I ended up 7th having had a pretty lonely time of it riding around by myself. Quite difficult to judge the pace in those conditions.

Super pole race.

As I pulled up to the line the bike clearly wasn’t well and I thought I could feel a vibration through the pegs. Like a complete idiot I ignored it and though it was nothing… I got a flying start but then bikes came past even faster than normal down the straights and the bike was clattering and banging. Again like an idiot I carried on until on the cool down lap it eventually locked. We stripped the bike and found the top head was damaged inside but all else seemed ok at first….
We had just rebuilt it and I was about to hit the starter when I noticed that the fly wheel was slightly cocked....... yep i'd snapped the crank! Unbelievably we’d not noticed this in our rush to put the bike back together but it was snapped at the flywheel web again. I knew what I’d done, I had been over revving out of the first corner to save losing drive as the bike went from lying on its side to upright where the revs drop off due to the tyre height.

We worked all night until the early hours to fit a new crank and re-build the engine. The bike now had to have the previous cracked head glued and re-fitted also, so now we had 2 cracked heads fitted that were both sealed with chemical metal! We started the bike at 1am in the morning and really didn’t care if we woke our paddock neighbours because we just wanted to be sure it was right before we went to bed. All seemed well, thank god!!

Sunday

During warm-up I just prayed that the bike would stay together. Once I returned to the pit we found that one of the glued heads had sprung a leak. So we stripped the bike again and re-glued it with so much glue that the spark plug was now glued in too.

Race 1

I got a reasonable start again but got passed by 6 bikes done the back straight and a further 2 had pulled level at the end but I managed to sort them out on the brakes. It was going to be tougher than I thought. I basically rode my own race as it was impossibly to keep up with the rocket ships down the straights and out of the slow corners. I got down to 1m17 dead but I should have changed the rear tyre as it had gone off within half distance and I was high siding out of sears and sliding the rear at Corams. I finished a measly 7th. To put it into perspective the guy who finished last did a 1m20 dead! The top 12 were doing at least 17's!

Race 2

It started raining and a quick calculation in my head told me that I simply didn't want to add a crash to the weekend events so I rode like a big girl and finished a terrible 10th. Snetterton is hopefully the last circuit with us having to settle for damage limitation so we are looking forward to some twisty circuits coming up.

All in all a rubbish weekend, but we never gave in and I think that shows how determined we really are!!