Chris Northover, 14/04/06 – 15/04/06
Racedays.Net Academy
Viva L’Espagne
Wednesday morning, 9:00am. After joining up with the Bond contingent at Dover, we boarded the ferry on our mission to Valencia. In record time, they were sick of my endless chattering by approximately 9:02am! The boat was fun, we won a whole £1 on the quiz machine which I was delighted with. Then Matt pointed out we’d spent more than a tenner trying to win, dammit!
Once off the ferry and on the road the journey seemed to take forever so Matt and I passed the hours away by seeing if it was possible to talk the fastest lap of Valencia! I also indulged in the mindless pap that is sudoku and feel very ashamed to admit it!
Come Friday and we finally got the chance to ride in our first session on track, exciting enough after the winter lay off, but with the added bonus of following a certain Mr. McWilliams of GP fame. Within a few laps we were starting to get a feel for the lines around the challenging Ricardo Tormo Circuit. After the first session Matt and I were separated on fastest laps by something like 5/100ths of a second! Throughout the remaining sessions we gradually got faster with Matt getting down to a lap time of 1min 47seconds. Saturday morning gave the opportunity for some video work, with Jeremy riding round with us filming from behind then from in front. This gave us the opportunity to see not only our own riding styles, but also to see the difference between the lines we should be on and the lines we were on! It was a real eye opener leading to comments like:
“I could have sworn I was closer to the apex than that!â€
and
“Nah that can’t be me riding, I didn’t brake there, summat wrong with your camera mate!â€.
So determined to make a better job of meeting apexes and riding the correct lines, we continued to lap, under the watchful eye of Jeremy who was on hand at all times to give tips and pointers enabling us to get the lap times lower. We finished the day both on 1:47 lap times (although Matt was a few tenths of a second faster but I’m not going to admit that!). We spent Sunday watching the other riders, especially the Stiggy Motorsports team rider who was going into the first turn so sideways there was blue smoke from his rear tyre, mental!
Monday
Cimbed the mountain (ok, hill) behind the track in the pouring rain and named it “Mount CGâ€. Got very wet. And cold. And got blisters on my feet. Should have thought more carefully about that!
Tuesday
Climbed “Mount CG†again, in the sunshine this time!
Bought some “double pluggies†(that’s sandals to most people!) and did loads of revision (ahem) for uni work.
Wednesday
Gave Mount CG a miss, revised instead (hope my lecturers read this!!).
Went to find the sea/beach with Roger. Now, you’d have thought it would be just a case of driving to Valencia (which is on the coast) and then aiming for the big blue wobbly thing. Not so. Two and a half hours later after the umpteenth CG Detour tm, we gave up and headed back to the circuit.