The final track day of the year has come and gone, and it was a superb end to the season. I’ll be splitting this weekend up into 2 posts as the first day was an open pit lane event and on the Sunday we took part in our first competitive motorcycle event, in the final round of Franciacorta’s Time Attack Championship.

The weather couldn’t have been more perfect with low 20s and clear skies meaning the track temperature was high, but we weren’t overheating in our suits. We rented a few spots in the garage for the weekend which gave us good cover from the sun and also meant we had a decent amount of space for the bikes, which could then be locked up over night.

Taking part this round would be Argy, Francesco and myself, just like at Bresse a month ago. A great shot of all us together on track:

Leading up to the weekend I’d changed the rear sets, as detailed in the previous post, which reversed my shifting to a GP setup. This meant I dedicated a bit of the first morning just getting accustomed to the new shifting direction and also tweaking the foot-peg positions and setup.

The GP shifting was a great change and I was surprised how easy it was to adapt it to. It allows me to upshift much more seamlessly and the downshifts are not a problem. I did have to move the heel guards inwards as much as possible as they were causing my outer foot to slip off the peg and also I moved the shift peg to suit my height.

Argy got his MV Agusta F4 750 in a more track ready condition, after the Tuono suffered issues at the last track day. New complete race fairing set, which allowed him to remove the heavy front headlight unit. He also switched over to some Pirelli Superbike slicks as the Pirelli Rosso IIIs weren’t really suited to track duty.

Frankie was learning the track as it was his first time there and gaining more and more confidence on the awesome Suzuki GSX-R 1000 K5.

I’ll post the full video with the fastest laps in the next post, but I also made a short POV style video showing the basic experience of a run. I clearly need to work on the angle of the helmet mounted GoPro:

Our pace was relatively conservative throughout the day as we got accustomed to the track again. We didn’t have transponders but I would guess somewhere in the 1:26-27 range.

For the first time this season I actually changed a suspension setup on the bike. So far I haven’t really messed with it after our friend Michael set it up, as I didn’t feel like I had the pace nor the experience to think about it, but I wasn’t too happy with the looseness of the rear end, especially on throttle cut.

So I stiffened up the damping on the rear shock by 2 clicks on compression and rebound to keep it more settled. It certainly improved the situation a bit as the bike felt more stable in the rear but I did notice that my rear tire was now getting a bit more cut up after the change. Will have to work on this next season as I used to have great tire wear before.

Towards the end of the day, during our simulated endurance run, I started having issues with the bike as it would misfire between and only 8,000 and 9,000 RPM. I tried to solve the issue by changing the air filter to a new BMC race unit and also put fresh fuel in (as I had refilled on some older fuel).

At the end of the day the issue still remained, which put in question whether I would be able to race in the Time Attack event the very next day.

To be continued…