15/03/06 – Testing At Valencia With Racedays.net
After some long delays for parts and then a mad rush to get everything fitted so the bikes could be set up on the dyno the long trek to Valencia began. Needless to say that the journey was much longer than we anticipated although I suspect it is something that we would soon get used to. Not sure whether that is a god thing or a bad one but…
The bike still had to have the bodywork fitted at the circuit and we hadn’t had the chance to fit some fresh rubber so it was a busy introduction to the season. We decided to not fit the stickers to the fairings until after the testing as we didn’t have many spares with us and didn’t want to tempt fate. The Racedays.net set up was excellent with loads of advice for Matt and Chris from Jeremy McWilliams.
It was easy to forget that aside form the abortive couple of sessions at a cold Cadwell Park this was the first time Matt had ever ridden a 600cc bike and the first time in ages that he had needed to learn a new circuit. With lots of help and encouragement plus the excellent tuition from Jeremy both riders were soon picking up the pace.
It was interesting for me to see how they both rode and learn how they learnt things during the two days. Having worked with Matt before it was encouraging how quickly he got on with the bike but however fast he went Chris was always just a fraction of a second behind. We had all expected Chris to be much faster on a 600 than Matt, initially at least, but when the handling on his R6 from 2005 could only be described as challenging it was almost as if he was having to learn to ride a bike for the first time.
Photos copyright @ MIST Suzuki Racing 2006