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everywhere else," Mladin said at the end of the three-day test, held in swelteringly hot and humid / Ben Bostrom was the third-fastest man on the clocks at Barber. The former World Superbike contender was the last man in the 2Ss, with a time of 1:25.942. conditions, and twice inter\. rupted by brief thunder- i showers. "The whole motorcycle was different. It was good to go find some new areas to work on the bike and try some new stuff." Crew chief Peter Doyle said, "We're prioritizing here. We're trying to get a gO-percent setup , and get through some tires." , Mladin set his fast time of 1:25.054, on the official AMA Timing £, Scoring clocks, on , Thursday afternoon. The morning session had been curtailed when he ran into engine problems, and rain kept him off the track until well into the afternoon. When he went back out, he turned his fastest laps of the test. But the pursuit of lap times wasn't what Mladin and the others were here for. They needed to find settings that would work over race distance on a track unlike any other on the calendar. THE TEST The 21-turn circuit is heavily biased toward right-hand corners, with the bikes spending a disproportionate amount of time on the sides of their tires. Rear tires weren't a problem, but everyone, 600 riders included, were chewing up fronts, and Dunlop's Jim Allen left knowing they'd have to build something special (See Briefly). "There was no point going out there and being silly this time of the year," Mladin said of trying to set the fastest lap. "We're just trying to get some sort of direction with the motorbike. It seems like we found the direction, and it was good to end up to see where everyone else was compared to us." Mladin's crew chief Doyle said they'd changed the offsets three times on Wednesday, ending up with the steepest front-end settings all year. "It makes it turn easier," Doyle said, something teammate Aaron Yates observed. "I noticed (his quick steering) when Mat (Mladin) chased me down a little bit and he come by," said Yates, who had the second-fastest time. "He actually passed me twice in the same spot on the back straight out of that first little fast left-right thing. His bike must be flicking real easy through there and able to get on the gas earlier. Able to pick up the throttle and drive out of there a bit harder than 1 am. That's kind of one of the main spots where he had a bit of time on me, it looks like." Yates went the other way on the front end. "We raked my thing out pretty good," he said. "We did that, and that helped me just getting into the turns on the brakes a bit. Seemed to help give me a little feeling on the front end. It didn't make the bike steer any quicker through the real fast spots, for sure. We didn't really try anything else. We were kind of focused on trying to get the bike settled down a little and get some feel out of the front tire. That's what we found there." Like Mladin, Yates found himself in new territory on his settings. "We changed the geometry pretty good on the bike; we changed everything," Yates said. We've been running it pretty steep. We just made some changes on the bike, and it's a lot better getting into the turns. Especially the faster turns on the brakes the bike's a lot more stable. I was having a lot of problems with the bike wiggling and jiggling around. I'm able to sit on the thing, turn on the gas and go now. We picked up some grip; we got the thing to steer. That's what we came here really struggling with." American Honda's Ben Bostrom said he'd hit a wall after Wednesday, his fastest lap a 1:26.554. "We need to find something in the bike to go Ben Spies posted the fastest time for the Formula Xtreme competitors at the Barber Test. The Yoshimura Suzuki rider posted a 1:26.008 - faster than several of the factory Superbike riders onhand. cue I e n e _ S • AUGUST 13, 2003 7