Alex Pickett Update
The Kawasaki was all ready early on in the day, much of the work had been finished on Sunday by Rob anyway. It’s holding up well. The weather was near perfect tonight, a bit windy but then that dropped by the time practice started at 6.20pm.
No issues in scrutineering but for some reason they get everyone out on Glencrutchery Road for the start of practice. Unless you have a generator your tyres go cool. By the time we got the bike out on to the road I was one of the last riders to go and I got held up a number of times by slower riders.
The plan was to do two laps straight if I was comfortable. The changes we had made to the front forks were better but the rear was squatting like a big bike under power. I went through anyway, deciding to live with it the way it was for another lap. You have to remember, a lap for me at this stage is just under 20 minutes. Doing two laps was also about making sure the 21 litre tank on the bike held enough fuel for two laps.
You are allowed to run a 22 litre tank but it has to retain the original silhouette. My dad Chris and Brad Woodhouse from B and C Motorcycles enlarged the tank by using compressed air and cutting out the filler neck of the bike, taking the tank from the original 17 litres to 21. It had enough fuel to do two laps in one hit so the goal was achieved.
Up near Windy Corner I saw a Kawasaki ZX-10R literally destroyed, the bike was in two pieces. I think the rider is OK, we haven’t heard anything about it and the session wasn’t red flagged.
When I stopped after lap two Mark made some changes to the rear shock rebound and the guys set me off after putting some more fuel in and changing my visor. Apparently Bruce Anstey set off right behind me on the Padgetts RCV Honda. He passed me around a third into the course, and it was cool to hear the drone of the V4 as he flew past.
A similar thing happened at Windy Corner when Michael Dunlop slipped underneath me as I was tipping in. I was close enough to see him smash the throttle wide open, the bike pulled a wheel stand out of the corner and started wiggling about on full throttle with 225 horsepower trying to turn the tyre. Now that’s how you do it I thought as I wound my little 600’s throttle to the stop myself. No wheel stand for me, just a screaming engine. The rear end of my bike was much better.
I need to change the gearing too. At Snetterton I ran 15/44 sprockets, the ones already on the bike when I got it. The gearing was a bit short, or low, there so we changed it to 16/42 for the island. It’s still a bit short in some long straight areas and up on the Mountain Mile. We are changing it to 16/40 to see how that goes.
We are also going to replace the valves in the rims for 90 degree ones, as we are losing 2-3 psi each time we go out, when in fact the the tyre pressure should be going up. We are putting this down to centrifugal force pushing the valves down ever so slightly. With the 90 degree ones this shouldn’t be a problem.
My fastest time was a 115.96 lap, so let’s call it 116 mp/h. I was held up a number of times too by newcomers and slower guys so I think a 117 or 118 is achievable in practice week. I was told I was 20th fastest in super sport last night, not bad out of near 90 riders.
Everyone is happy, the bike is sweet overall, and I have a good team around me who know what they are doing, which helps a lot. As soon as I got in the bike was on the stand, fairings off, brakes off and wheels out. It was cleaned and checked, my girlfriend Tay got stuck into cleaning my leathers and Jennie, Sue, Megan and my mum Kerrie got dinner sorted.
We all had a great BBQ in the pits afterwards and my old man even had a few too many bourbons and coke. And Megan joined him. Light weights. We rolled dad into the car and headed back to our digs in Douglas around 11.30pm.
