Tuesday, December 6 2011
Kawasaki Team Riders, Tom Sykes and Joan Lascorz have now completed their 2011 testing programme and so begin their winter break on a high, having achieved what they had hoped for during tests in Spain.
Good track conditions at Valencia allowed both riders to improve their performance, with both Sykes and Lascorz setting consistently good lap times. Sykes in fact set a best lap of 1’33.1s on race tyres, which is almost a tenth faster than the best Superpole lap ever recorded at the venue.
The tests allowed the riders to get to grips with the many changes which have been made to the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10R, namely to the suspension, electronic systems and the geometry of the chassis. There were even Japanese engineers on hand as all the team-members refined and reshaped their handling strategies.
As the winter test ban lifts in January, the team will once again take to the Spanish tracks, taking further tests at Almeria before the start of the new WSBK season which begins on February 26th 2012 at Phillip Island, Australia.
Tom Sykes: “The tests went well and we ended up doing a 1’33.1 lap time on a race tyre. We have worked through a lot of different things, we are working well in the garage and I am relaxed. It is no secret that when I’m relaxed I work my best. We have had some good weather – consistent weather – in Valencia and that made it better to work through all we needed to do. We have a new electronics package and found a better overall machine balance for me. We also went well at Aragon even though we only really had half a good day there, because of weather and some car tyre rubber laid on the track surface. Once the conditions improved it took us only four outings of four laps each to beat the kind of lap times I set at the race last summer. Right now we are on a package that we have not changed so much between the two tests. We have a fairly good base setting that works for race distance and, when we put new tyres in, for a fast lap time as well. I think we have come a long way even since the post-season Portimao test. The bike tells me what it is doing quite a lot better than before, and the improved feedback tells me when I am arriving at the limit.”
Joan Lascorz: “I am very happy the way the test went because I set good lap times and I was very happy with the performance of the bike and the team. We made a lot of changes to the bike, changed a lot of general settings and worked on the suspension. Some are now much different from last year. All the staff worked well together again. I think I learned most from this test in terms of finding out more about our latest machine settings and then finding a more consistent good pace. These things should allow us to challenge closer to the top in 2012. Tom was very fast and we both worked well with race tyres.”
