Aintree - Test Day Review (2024)

With the Aintree race season kicking off on Saturday 11th May, we decided it would be a good idea to attend the test day - having only visited the circuit twice (once in 1999 and once in 2015) in the past. We decided to take just the one bike and to run a simple setup. The day was very relaxed and there were plenty of familiar faces in attendance and, fortunately, we were graced with beautiful weather for the day.

​We had some target lap times in mind, which we would aim to get by the end of the season. We had done a Personal Best lap time of a 1:05.0 on the Kawasaki ER650 Supertwin back in 2015 so thought that a 1:01.999 would be a good target time for the Aprilia RS660 Trofeo (which wasn't here today) and as the Kawasaki ZX6R is more powerful we thought that a 1:00.999 would be a good target time.

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.

Photo by Andy Woodman

​In Session 2 we made some compression damping adjustments to see whether we could dial out any of the bumpiness - it didn't work but I guess that there is no setting that would make this circuit feel like an uber-smooth Donington Park! The circuit (like all others) has it's own unique characteristics, so we decided to just try and live with it. After another 12 laps we had reduced our lap time to a 1:00.21 but were hitting the rev limiter in top gear, so needed to make a gearing change.

Taking a tooth off the rear

We changed from a 15/46 to a 15/45 gearing setup for Session 3 which was sufficient to stop us hitting the limiter. As we had got into 1:00-laps in Session 2 we felt comfortable that the lap times would come to us more easily - but they didn't and we were stuck on 1:01-laps! It turns out that if we feel comfortable with the bumps, then we're just not going fast enough...

​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).

Starting to be consistent

Photo by Andy Woodman

We had got to a point where we felt ready/comfortable to join a qualifying session, so decided to call it a day. We had exceeded our expectations and had met our objectives for the day.

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!