GETTING READY TO RACE
At last, we’ve built an engine to compete at a higher level than last year.
Well, if it performs as well as it looks, we might be able to stay a little closer to the front-runners.
Standing proud after a tough two days trial at Donington Park.
More of the credit has to go to Ritchie though, who has put so much time and effort into this new motor. Also thanks to sponsors – and new friends – like Wiseco and their European distributor, because without their help we wouldn’t be where we are right now
Like a new un! …our racing engine for 2017.
.
After Cadwell we don’t seem to have stopped at all. We’ve been permanently on the go from the start, or was it the end?
We had to look for another engine and crankcase halves to fix the spare engine, had engineering work done when things go wrong – old engines sometimes don’t come apart the way they should – measuring, re-measuring and finally assembling it all.
A good session at Donington Park had our Ritchie going quicker than last year.
After running the engine in, it all sounding pretty good and after our first session at Donington we were really pleased with it.
Ritchie was very happy the way it delivers the power and managed to take a second off his qualifying and race time last year; not a bad place to start.
The sound of it coming down the start-finish straight was very different from the old standard engine. Awesome!
Alan Garret at R&G Racing have been a massive help too. His team developed some special crash protectors for the ZX7R.
New shape for 2017 - our special ZX7R crash protection for R&G.
They’re nicely shaped and are little shorter than previous and shouldn’t ‘dig in’ so much when the bike goes over a strip, on to the grass or into the gravel.
We hope we won’t need to use them as much this year!
Pushing an underpowered bike meant riding on the absolute limit most of the time.
Still, they say if you want to ride fast get on a slow bike. Well, Ritchie knows how that feels.
We also took a trip up to the north to visit our friends at Kais Suspension.
It’s always a pleasure to spend time with the Godfather of Suspension, Andy White and his specialist team in Atherton. They gave us a corner of the work shop to take the forks out and shock off the bike and serviced them there and then.
Everything measured up nicely in the corner of the Kais workshop.
It was good for Ritchie to spend time with Andy talking about one or two issues he had last year.
Once we started measuring the sag with Ritchie sitting on and off the bike there were some big changes made for the better. Setting up the bike with the lads at Kais really helped and the bike felt noticeably different when tested at Donington Park – it was more settled everywhere.
Good for confidence when you’re going much quicker.
We also took it for a spin at a feezing cold Brands Hatch at the weekend.
It ran really well again, but the weather was very cold with light rain at times– too cold to improve on times from last year, but it was good to be back on our home circuit again and we have an idea of where to start when we’re there for the first round next week.
We hope things go well for him after all the work during the winter months .
Thanks to all, more soon.
