I’m buying a house soon. I asked one of my sponsor’s, Extreme Arts and Gadgets in the Isle of Man, to find me a signed poster of the cast of Pulp Fiction. And he found it. I knew he would. Sorry for the poor quality picture, but it’s the first thing that I’ll put on the wall in the new place. www.extreme-ag.com
Go to the online lads’ mag www.monkeymag.co.uk to enter a competition to win this mega prize from Guy’s sponsors – Red Torpedo.
Attend the BSB qualifying day (you choose the round from any but Donington) and receive
· £100 Red Torpedo clothing
· Pillion ride with Guy around the BSB circuit on the Red Torpedo bike
· Full hospitality with Guy’s Hydrex Bike Animal Honda team
· Meet the team
· Access to pit, paddock and garage and loads of photo ops
*Prize is for one winner who can take one friend along. The friend will get a 3 pack of Red Torpedo pants and the rest of the prize (except £100 of RT clothing and pillion ride)
Photo: Martin Heath
My Fireblade had a misfire on Friday, so I didn’t get out in the morning. You can’t give these riders and inch so it didn’t help to miss a session. It turns out to be a bug in the laptop that we use to download the telemetry data and reprogram the ECU.
When I did get out I was still lacking a bit of front end confidence in the new Showas. Everything is about front end confidence. Racing’s all in your head. You’ve got to have confidence. But we kept plugging away and improving it. The team’s suspension man, Javier from ProShock, is a top fella and he’s getting his head around these new Showas as well.
I qualified 19th and got up to 15th in the first race. Hard work for one point.
As I rolling out of pitlane for race two the misfire came back. We’d changed the gearing and someone had plugged in the laptop again to remap the ECU. I had to start from the back of the grid, 32nd place, because I didn’t get out in time to take my place on the gird. I was up to 16th when they red flagged the race for a crash. On the restart they gave me 16th and I managed to get up to 9th in the end. It’s good to be in the top ten. It’s where I need to be.
And it could have been worse. The red flag was out for my old team-mate, and my best friend out of all the racers, Karl Harris. He had a hell of an accident when Tom Sykes’ flying Suzuki hit him in the face. It was like a Looney Toons accident. People who saw it on TV thought he was a goner, but he’s so hard he got up and walked to the ambulance. Legend.
We’re definitely getting there and we’re improving all the time. We’re moving forward with each session and now I’m riding the bike rather than the other way around! The changes we made in the morning were a step in the right direction for the first race and we made it a little bit better for the second race.
The second race set-up was a lot closer to where I wanted to be so I’ve got to say a big thank you to the team – especially Warren, Kate and James – for all their work as I put them through it a bit this weekend. Rome wasn’t built in a day but the second race was a lot more like it and I really enjoyed myself out there – I was revving all the way!
See you at Oulton on May 3-5. Come say hello.
I’ve just signed a deal with Dainese now. It took a long while and I didn’t think it was going to come off, but I’m glad it did. They’re a good company to be involved with.Within days of confirmation I flew out to Italy to be measured up.
Their place is in Molvena, in the middle of nowhere.It’s like driving to Kirmington, you’ve got to be heading there. The R&D department is on one side of the road and the production line’s on the other side. The production line is for made-to-measure and prototype stuff. Most off-the-peg stuff is made elsewhere.
Silvano, the same fella that measures Rossi up, measured me.What are the chances of that? What a bloke. He asked what size off-the-peg I wear and gave me some to try on. Then he asked me to get into a racing crouch and pinched the leathers and made notes in a pad. He didn’t use a tape measure or anything, just measured by eye and hand. He asked me loads of questions about how I liked my cuffs and which back protector I preferred. All sorts.
An hour down the road in Vicenza is Dainese’s CNC-controlled Bladerunner-style warehouse building. They have a private museum there full of everyone’s leathers, from Ago and Sheene onwards. They have Nico Vouilloz Rotwild mountain bike and Troy Corser’s Power Horse Ducati from when he won his first world championship.
Unfortunately it’s not open to the public. It’s for dealers from around the world to visit to order the next season’s designs.For the opening of the building they had Ago come and do a burn-out in the car park. Then they dug up the tarmac and put it on the wall as art.
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