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Chaz Checks In... Preseason March

It's been a long wait but finally I've been back on a 250 after 4 months off. Since my last update a couple of months ago not a great deal has happened! I've just been waiting for a call to confirm when our first test was going to be and unfortunately it's all happening a bit later than expected but at least I've been back on a bike.

I arrived in Barcelona on Monday night, so I had all of Tuesday to get to know my new team, Team Campetella and learn the 20 odd Italian names of all our 125 and 250 mechanics……no easy task! Due to some unexpected complications the bike that I was testing was not the bike that I was due to be riding this season. The bike that I was due to have is called the Aprilia 250 LE. Basically, this bike is the factory bike from the start of last year, so it doesn't have all the updates that were added to last years factory bikes throughout the season but nevertheless it's a very good package.

Before I flew to Barcelona I already knew that the bike I would be testing would not be what I expect to be racing this season. My team-mate, Taro Sekiguchi (who also rode for Campetella last year) and I were both due to be riding the LE Aprilia and we would have one 'kit' Aprilia between us as a spare bike. At the test, Taro was given the '06 kit, which includes the full engine kit and the carbon fibre swing-arm whereas my bike was what my Dad nicknamed the 'Bitsa', meaning made up of bits! It had about 85% of the 'kit' engine parts and I was using the standard aluminium swing-arm so I was at an immediate disadvantage but the most important thing was to get some kilometres in, and re-ignite all the riding muscles that have been out of action for the last 4 months.

On the first day we only had half a day on track because the 125's had the morning session. As usual, it all felt a bit weird for the first few laps and then I started to get back into the 250 rhythm of things. The first thing I noticed is that this bike seemed to be small, either that or I've grown a few inches in four months which I'm pretty sure hasn't happened! I was struggling to tuck in and, to get in the bike properly I had to put my ass right on top of the seat, but after I got used to it, it was a minor problem. After doing a few laps, my first problem was that the bike was extremely nervous, to the point that when I was on the gas and went over a slight crest or bump in the track it would buck me straight out of the seat. We played around with the chassis geometry and made some good improvements which made the bike much more stable and I was getting more and more comfortable with the bike but we still needed much more.

The session officially ended at 6:00pm but most teams would stop about 5 ish due to the falling track temperature and the shade on the back side of the circuit making it that little bit easier to slip off. We stopped at about 5:15pm and although I wasn't totally comfortable on the bike I felt we'd made a lot of progress and I was staring to gel with the team. I was disappointed because I expected to be faster than what I was but knew as soon as I was feeling 100% confident, then the times would come without too much trouble. Although we had manage to stabilise the bike I still felt it was too nervous and I was struggling to trail the brakes into the turns without the front bouncing. That evening my mechanics took my front forks to Öhlins to be serviced and they found that one of the fork springs was bent which wouldn't have helped matters and put my mind at ease for the following day.

On Thursday, when the sun had been out for an hour and created a bit of heat, we took to the track at about 11:15am. We started with the settings that I had finished with on Wednesday. When I was running in new pistons for the first few laps I could tell straight away that the fork spring hadn't really made much difference to how the bike was behaving which was a bit worrying. After 15 or so laps I had gone ½ second faster than the previous day but was still about 2 seconds off where I thought I should have been. I was at the barrier where breaking the 1.52 was a struggle. I had done a 1.51.8 but I thought that to go any faster something would have to be seriously different. At the GP last year I qualified on a 1.49.0, I didn't expect to beat that as the bike is more standard than what I was riding last year but I at least expected to get within 1 second of it.

This puzzled me quite a bit I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried! I knew that it was the first test whereas everybody else had already had at least 1 test but normally within half a day I can be straight back on the case after a winter off. So, we played around with the front of the bike in hope of stumbling across a setting which would allow me to trail the brakes into the turns much more than I was currently able to do. Nothing was really making much difference and we changed absolutely everything! Harder, softer, more preload, less preload, more rebound, less rebound, lengthened the bike and shortened it, opened and closed the angle of the front forks but nothing made any difference what so ever. When it got to about 3pm we were all scratching our heads.

My chief mechanic, Luca, suggested that maybe there was still something wrong with the forks. I was a bit unsure because they had been serviced by Öhlins the previous evening and they had just found the bent spring. We decided that I should sit out for a bit and then, once my team mate had finished, get the forks out of his bike and try them in mine as we didn't have a spare set to try. At 4:30pm my team mate had finished and my mechanics swiftly nicked the forks out of his bike and got them into mine and I was back out on track at just after 5pm. It took me all of about………hmm…… 2 corners to realise that I'd been riding around on dodgy forks for the last 2 days and it felt so much better! On my second lap I matched my best lap and on my third lap went faster. I did about 8 laps and went 1.3 seconds faster quite comfortably. It's strange than when you ride around and the bike is behaving in a certain way for the best part of 2 days that when the problem is fixed, it's tricky to get back into the normal rhythm. It was about 5:20pm when I got back to the pit box and decided that it was getting a bit cold to continue and now that we'd found the problem, we can start from scratch in Jerez. Me and the team were obviously well chuffed to have found the route of all evil that was causing me some worry and the mechanics stress for the last day and a half! I was still about 1/1.5 off where I wanted to be but considering we'd changed my bike around a hell of a lot and not put it back to it's original settings, put my team-mate's forks straight in without altering any of his settings and was on probably the most standard bike out there I didn't think it was too bad. The most important thing was for me to get so kilometres in and work with the team which is a real pleasure! They are really on the ball when we were playing with the chassis and I feel really confident in them and they are real professionals.

So, for now I've got to look towards Jerez next week. I'll be riding the same bike again which I'll do what I can with and the team are going to bring their spare forks from Italy which should help. There are quite a few things going on behind the scenes which hopefully result in me being on the LE bike for the first race but all we can do for now is keep our fingers crossed.

Chaz#57!