Most expensive race of the season!

September 5, 2005 - The Donnington round was very close to the previous Snetterton round. Shelley and John Capes sorted out the crash damage and forks to get the bike prepared. We had to use the old fairings as there was not enough time to get new ones and get them painted up. The Moores team kindly loaned us their old fairings in case we needed to do any repairs during the day. We also had no practice sessions prior to race day. Our third rider was Mark Talbot, such a late decision that he wasn’t even on the KRC program.

On race day I took the bike out in the warm up session, just to check everything was OK. There were no problems apart from our new brake pads did not work. These were changed for a good set donated by the Moores team, who we share our garage with.

All three riders did qualifying with no incidents, putting us in our usual mid field position. The circuit had been recently re-surfaced and was very smooth. This was great and helped the bike’s handling a lot.

I did the start, the first time this year. My lap times were reasonable getting me up to about 10th buy the time I noticed the low fuel warning light was on and signalled the pits that I would be coming in. This meant a short session. There was about 2 litres of fuel left in the bike so I could have done a few more laps, but it was better to pit early than to run out. The only problem was that we were not doing a full hour so our strategy had to change for the remainder of the race.

Mark took the next session and kept up good lap times to maintain a good place. Shelley took the third session and maintained very consistent lap times. My next session was the fourth. The bike was OK initially but after a short time the tyres got more and more slippery, dropping my lap times a bit. Nearing the end of my session the rear brake lever broke, not too much of a problem to ride without it.

A very short time later the gear linkage broke so I had to pit early and without warning as I was stuck in gear. At this change over to Mark we also replaced the rear tyre losing about 10 laps in the process. Mark went on to ride some good laps and pick up a few places. Shelley took the next session and was once again consistent but a little slower. As a result of our shorter sessions, we brought Shelley in early leaving a final one-hour session to be split between Mark and myself. I was first out and kept up a reasonable pace. Mark went out for the last half hour to finish the race in 21st position.

I was a little disappointed that we did not finish higher as it looked like we would be inside the top fifteen. The results were so close that our small problems dropped us down the order a lot.

This was the final round and we have to wait for the organisers to put up the points for the last two rounds to see where we finished in class.

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