Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

"Through the day it got progressively worse and worse and worse," (Above) Steve Rapp threw a softer tire on and went out and turned the quickest lap of the test right at the very end. he said, "and then, with two hours to go, I said 'This thing's junk, just go back to how it was.' And they put it back to exactly how it was, and I had front end, a crucial factor in a fast lap at Willow Springs. "I felt confident sticking it in and that's what you have to do here, you've got to stick the front end to get the corner speed going and I just felt a lot better at the end of the day," Slight said. The test for him was to get familiar with the bike and the team, all of which he had to do on very short notice and after a long flight. Slight arrived in the country on Sunday from his home in New Zealand and was set to ride on Monday until rain scuttled the day. "I was just trying to find out what I could change all weekend," Slight said. "You really don't know what can be changed. I had to learn the bike as well as the guys." In the middle of Thursday afternoon Slight went out with HMC Ducati's Scott Russell to give his former Muzzy Kawasaki teammate a tow. Russell turned his best lap while chasing Slight, but a fast time wasn't his objective. The Georgian wanted to get a feel for the Ducati on proper race tires, not the dual-compound rubber he'd used at Daytona. What made it difficult was that Russell was riding a very tired Ducati at a track he doesn't like. "I'm tired of this place," Russell said. "I was tired of it after the first day. I never have gone good here. This is just not a good racetrack for me. Forget all that, it was a good test. It was good to work with these guys again and I think we're going to have a good season." Russell had a unique view on the speed of the Ducati. "The bike, it feels fast to me after riding the Harley. I mean, really, that's the way I was looking at it," he said. "I can't say the bike was tired, but it is. When Aaron came up on me I was like, 'God, this thing's slow.'" But once it's freshened up Russell likes his chances for a sixth Daytona 200 win. "They're going to go home and build some new stuff and we'll be back at Daytona and ready to win it," he said. eN them raise it a little bit in the back, just because it's cold out, not hot like it usually would be." After reverting to the old set-up, and fitting the softer rubber, Rapp dropped down to his best, a 1: 19.31, followed by a 19.7, and two more 19.3s. Why bother fitting the softer tire? "Confidence, prove a point," Rapp said. "I don't know, especially going to Daytona anything you can do to build your confidence even if it's just a test. Not even all the teams are here." One of the three at full strength was Kawasaki, the only team at the test returning intact. Last year the ZX- 7 was inconsistent, with Bostrom losing a second or more between the morning and afternoon sessions, and for no reason. The objective at Willow was to continue to pinpoint the problem, especially for Daytona, a track that Bostrom doesn't like. "We have an idea of what our problems are at Daytona and why it causes us so much grief, and so the whole objective was to make a better Daytona bike," Bostrom said after setting third fastest time, a 1:20.27. "We definitely got some direction and we made some fairly huge changes and were able to keep' going pretty decent. We weren't fastest, but that really wasn't the idea." At Daytona, entry grip is the problem. "We're looking for a bike that will enter the corners without having to highside," Bostrom said. "We had (Top) Eric Bostrom did a few laps on the 600, but concentrated mostly on the Supel1)lke. (Above) Scott Russell chases his fonner Suzuka Eight-Hour teammate, Aaron Slight, around Willow SprIngs. (Left) Doug Chandler continues to find the solution to a tront..nd problem on the Kawasaki. that problem a lot of places last year, but we started to come to grips with it a little bit. During the test down there, I literally could not crash the bike on the front end, that's how little traction we had going into the corner." The solution was to find a better balance in the bike and Bostrom said they thought it would come from the front end. CompetitionAccessories.com's Larry Pegram set his best time, fourth fastest, while chasing Mladin late in the day. The time was respectable, a 1:20.3, but Pegram was more concerned with getting to know his new mechanics and finding out how they'd work together. "For me, everything's really good, I'm starting to get my confidence back a little after last year, being on a 2-year-old motorcycle," he said. "I was getting beat. And now I can see that I can run with these guys, so my confidence is coming back up. I got my leg fixed this winter too. I'm a lot more mobile on the bike. I can hang off it a little bit more. The guys I got this year... they know so much about these things - they've been in World Superbike, they've been in GPs." The test had been planned far in advance, but it gained importance when they brought Aaron Slight into the team just prior to the test. Pegram hadn't tested the new Ducati on a road course and Slight had only ridden a Ducati once in a magazine test in England, so both had plenty to leam. "We weren't the fastest, but we weren't the slowest," Pegram said. "Aaron seemed to get on real quick with the bikes and he seems to like them." Slight ended up sixth fastest, just behind Kawasaki's Doug Chandler. Like Bostrom, Chandler was chasing a front-end problem, not wholly successfully. "We didn't really get accomplished what we wanted, which was to just get comfortable with the bike," Chandler said. "I think it's pretty good, but today was just kind of a struggle trying to figure out what's wrong with it. I still don't think we've got it quite right. I think there's something funny in the forks, but at least we know where to look." The team was finding foreign material in the forks, which affected a number of the intemal fork components. At the end of the test, his first on a Ducati, his first at Willow Springs, and his first on Dunlop tires in years, Slight pronounced himself happy, though he was disappointed in his time. His team only had two rear wheels, which meant a lot of waiting around for tires to heat up on the warmers. Slight turned" his best times on the hardest Dunlop compounds and thought he could have been lower in the 20s than his 20.65, had he have thrown a 587 on. By the end of the test he was gaining confidence in the cue I e n e _ s • FEBRUARY 28, 2001 29

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