Josh wanted to do an endurance race and offered his bike to use so we enlisted Danny and entered team Old Fast Slow. The endurance race is 3 hours long, the team that has completed the most laps at the end is the winner. We ran 20 minute sessions each but towards the end I let Josh get some more seat time (and his front brake was a bit spongy for my liking). There was a little confusion over the scoring but in the end we finished in 3rd place and got a nice plaque.
In the Saturday qualifiers I finished 13th and 11th and was starting to think that my bike was underpowered after repeatedly getting passed on the straight but then talked to James Royce who was on pole and he’s running a stock 07 GSX-R 600! He is running some crazy low gearing and I’m only getting into 4th on the straight so I think some new gearing could be in order. I have started scraping the footpeg coming out of the Carousel and Big Daddy which is not a huge deal but the sound of it threw me off when it first happened, I took the hero blob (the bolt sticking out the end of the peg) out of the peg, that should give me another degree maybe 🙂
I got 14th out of 32 in Lost Era, still 3.5s/lap back from James. In Old Folks I got a great start up to 8th but got passed by a few people and then as I dove up the outside of what must have been a novice back marker going on to the back straight, he must have panicked and decided that he couldn’t get round the corner because he sat up and pushed me off the track!! Thankfully neither of us fell off and I was able to turn round and rejoin the race but ended up 16 out of 22 thanks to that little fiasco! I don’t think it cost me 5 positions to put me in the top half – not overly happy with that result.
We wrecked Josh’s rear tire in the endurance so I offered him a front slick and he bought a brand new rear so he could have his first try on slicks – thanks to Danny for letting us use his spare warmers. He soon got used to them in the practice sessions but in his BOTT race when he was in 8th moving up the field looking like he’d get 5th or 6th place, he hit a false neutral in the Carousel, didn’t know what gear he was in and low sided. He hurt his wrist again and had to do some repairs but was soon back up and running thanks to the help of some very kind people in the pits – thanks guys!
