Boothy’s TT Log | Day 5 – Big Improvements

Tuesday nights TT practice session was a little bit frustrating, but we got two laps in on the big bike and two on the little one, so I’m a very happy little boy.

Yesterday’s practice session highlighted some slight issues with the setup on the FlyaSpitfire.com Kawasaki; in a nutshell, the suspension was too soft. There was some heavy bottoming out here and there, so we chucked a couple more clicks of compression damping and a few turns of preload on the forks and shock, and it was a massive help.

As well as it being fairly uncomfortable when the suspension smashes onto its bump-stops, it causes the bodywork to scrape along the floor, which if allowed to do for long enough, would wear through the fibreglass. So today one of my jobs was to go out in the van and find a shop that sold fibreglass repair kits. I found one, and we repaired the scraped up fairing.

I’m still not up to speed, but I know I’m going in the right direction with my pace and with the setup. Lap times tonight don’t really tell that story because I got stuck behind some slightly slower lads which meant I wasn’t able to run the lines or the corner-speed I would have liked. But I’m not too worried about lap times at the moment, because I’m feeling better on the bike every night.

In fact, speaking of feeling better on the bike, tonight was the best I’ve ever felt on the Surf Bar Triumph, in three years of racing it at the TT. Again, I was held up a bit by slower riders and there were a few crashes out on the course, so some sections had yellow flags waving (they wave yellow flags to let us know that there is an incident on the track ahead, so you’re expected to slow down a bit).

I’m going to have a word with Rico from Maxton suspension in the morning and see if he’s got any words of wisdom for me, as I think we can probably make the big bike handle better with some more tweaking.

Until tomorrow…

Boothy