Monday, and the second day of practice at the 2022 Isle of Man TT. After a few mini showers during the day, the weather cleared up and tonight’s practice went ahead. Another three laps on the big bike.
We had a bit of a ball-ach before the session with the numbers on the big bike. The scrutineers decided that they weren’t quite big enough, so I had a mad 20 minutes running around trying to find some white vinyl and black numbers to ‘bigger’ them up a bit. A massive pain in the arse, but we got it sorted in the end. It was a rush job, and it looks a bit messy, but we’ll tidy it up in the morning.
The plan was to try and get four laps on the FlyaSpitfire.com Kawasaki, and we nearly did. The three laps that I did manage were all a bit quicker than yesterday, so I’m fairly happy with how things are progressing. We came here with a setup that worked at the North West 200, and although it was fine last night, now I’m going a little bit quicker (121mph tonight) I’m starting to ask a bit more of the suspension; there was some fairly harsh bottoming out here and there, so we’re going to have a bit of a faff with it before tomorrow’s practice.
I was just accelerating out of the final corner on my third lap when the red flags came out, which is never nice to see at the TT; hopefully whoever is involved is ok. It mean that was the session over, which wasn’t too much of an issue for me because I was ready to come in and make some changes to the bike anyway.
The schedule for tomorrow was the same as tonight’s, so we could potentially get a four lap run on the big bike, but the sidecars never got a session tonight because of the red flag, so the organisers will probably shuffle the things about a bit to give the wheelbarrow lads a turn.
Since we arrived on the Isle of Man, there has been loads of people coming to say hello. People who’ve either watched our videos on YouTube or read our stuff on the website and it’s been really nice. I’ve genuinely been humbled by the amount of people that have taken the time to pop over, so if that’s you, thank you!
And thanks again to everyone that chipped in to get their name on the helmet… It’s honour to take you all with me round the TT course. Thank you.
Let’s have another go tomorrow.
Boothy x
