We were assigned Group B for the test and had the opportunity to go out in four 20-minute sessions throughout the day. By chance (or luck) our test group was sparcely populated which was great as it gave us room to learn the track uninterrupted. We quickly learned that it is a very bumpy track and (as the videos show!) we tried many different lines before finding something that worked for us. That being said... We guessed at these racing lines, so there still might be some room for improvement when we get on track at the race meetings.
Due to the nature of these videos (being test day sessions) we decided to uploaded them in their 'raw' form - so you might have to skip through them to find the good stuff. But in case you were wondering, our fastest three laps of the day can be found from 11:24 onwards in the "Session 3" video.
In Session 1 we tried to sort out the basics and after 12 laps had managed to reduce our lap time to a 1:02.1.
Realising that (despite not really liking it) we had to attack these bumpy corners to get anywhere, our lap times then started to drop again. By the end of our 14-lap run we had put in a series of laps in the 59-second barrier with a best of a 59.38 (although Dave Snr's time from "last corner to last corner" was captured as a 59.21).
Before we left, we watched a bit of on-track action and witnessed Ste Johnston have an unfortunate engine failure along the back straight on his Suzuki SV650 Supertwin. With only a short gap until the race meeting we hope he can get the bike up and running again.
Our next outing will be at Aintree again - at their championship opening round on Saturday 11th May - and then we will have a 4-week gap until the next race meeting. It has been a hectic start to the 2024 season, so a little break will probably be appreciated by then. We'll let you know how we get on!