AMA Pro Supersport at Infineon: Friday, May 14th
Practice and Qualifying
We were keeping to a relaxed schedule this morning because the show only started around noon, and I needed to change my attitude from mechanic to racer and that meant inner focus and calm. We got to the track around 9am, unpacked all the gear, and went to the official AMA rider and crew chief meeting at 10am. Some of the AMA top brass were on hand to throw out a positive report on how hard everyone were trying to make the series work, and to acknowledge the racers and teams for all their efforts. At one point we were told we were the “stars” and “the future of the sport” – and I was thinking they forgot about the “past of the sport”, oh well.
After the meeting we bumped in to our friend James Lickwar who’s been working on RoadRacingWorld and Vesrah teams for while and he told us they’d had luck with the soft, as opposed to the medium, compound rear tire. We went back to our pit and slipped on a set of the soft compound front and rear tires ready for practice. These D211 GP-A “spec” tires are cheaper than the full slicks I would normally buy, but are, by reports, more slippery, so I wasn’t expecting to set any personal best lap times this weekend on a borrowed bike with greasy tires.
The morning fog and clouds cleared up by around 11am, thankfully warming the tarmac before we went out. My plan was to work hard in the 50 minute noontime practice session to get used to the bike and adjust it to my needs, and then to try my best to qualify in the first qualifying session this afternoon, rather than wait for the second “qualie” session at 8am Saturday morning which would be cold and damp. We also decided to top the tank up and aim to get in 18 laps of practice to check fuel consumption and tire wear, in preparation for the 18 lap race.
My practice pace started out slow as I ran the bike for the first time on track, and got used to the tires. I came in after about 6 laps to raise the rear of the bike, which felt a little low, and to reduce the compression damping adjustment in the rear shock because the backend felt very harsh. Basically if you feel a problem in your hands it’s usually the front forks, and if you feel it in the whole bike or in your butt it’s the rear shock. I went out for 6 more laps and came back in for another adjustment to the shock because of the same harsh rear end problem. I know that a bike that’s set-up to go fast feels too stiff at slow speeds, so I kept building speed to see if the suspension started working. I finally came in at the end of the session with our target 18 laps in the book, and a reasonably well running bike with unyielding rear suspension.
The rear tire was completely tore-up, proving the poor compliance of the suspension, and Todd smartly suggested we change to a medium, and thus more durable, compound rear tire. We looked at my best lap time, which was a 1:49.5 and I took the conservative decision to keep the shock as-is and not make a radical change, because we were quickly approaching the short 20 minute qualifying session at 3:30pm with no recourse if we made a change and went in the wrong direction.
The qualifying session went by in a whirl: I ran 6 laps at about 85% effort to warm up, the bike feeling pretty decent, came in for a sip of water, one eye on the countdown clock, made a small adjustment to the shock, and went back out to put the hammer down for the last few minutes. I chopped a full second off my previous best time and put a 1:48.2 in the book to qualify in 12th place out of 22 entrants. Not bad for a pick-up team with a rattle-can paint-job.
Back in the pits and out of my leathers, I canvassed opinions from suspension guru James Siddall, and from team owner Daric Cheshire of Cheshire Motorsports, quickly arriving at the unsurprising consensus that the rear spring I was using was way too stiff. Todd and I rode around on the Munroe team scooter until we found a friendly face at Chris Perris’ pit, Evan, who lent us a 15% softer spring, which we mounted onto the 848’s shock before packing up the pit, and going home for an early night.
