All three of Kawasaki Racing Team’s riders, Tom Sykes and Loris Baz in the full Superbike class and David Salom in the Evo category, took part in the official tests at Portimao between 21 and 22 July, before the long summer break in track action begins in earnest.
With the season not restarting until early September this was the last chance in 2014 for the team to make larger set-up and technical developments before the cycle of race weekends begin again at Jerez in Spain.
Positive feedback with set-up changes gave both championship leader Sykes and top contender Baz good directions to head in to complete the current season in the best way possible.
Salom evaluated technical changes designed to meet the new demands of the 2015 regulations, with some full SBK items fitted to the Ninja ZX-10R Evo machine to start to understand its full potential under the new rules.
Using race tyres only, and with transponders fitted to all the machines, Sykes set the best lap time of the tests with a 1’42.719 while Baz made his best improvements on the final afternoon, setting a 1’43.110. Salom set a positive 1’44.487 best lap, despite being in the very early stages of the 2015 technical development package.
Tom Sykes: “On day one we put in 70 laps and we started some good work on some things. We have played with the geometry of the bike, and other things you cannot really do on a race weekend. The plan on day two was to go more in depth with some items but we had some issues and were not able to fully complete our test schedule. I only used one tyre on the final day and when we got back out on the track later on the day we still did competitive times on it at the end. So we have improved the bike again on used tyres. We still had some things to test, and it is not a big issue, but it would have been nice to have fine-tuned the bike even more. We ended up with a good lap time on day two. The bigger picture is that we can still go racing competitively and we feel we have improved the bike again during this test.”
Loris Baz: “I am happy with the lap times we set this afternoon. We lost some track time but on the final afternoon we set some good laps and made up time to the others. We took some steps forward and even though the track was a bit slower in the afternoon we still improved our times at the end. I am happy to have finished fastest in the afternoon session, and third fastest of the day. For sure we found some good things on the bike set-up. We went faster than we did in the race and we only used race tyres.”
David Salom: “We worked on the 2015 developments of the bike and it went well. We tried many new parts on the bike and it was very good. The main difference was in the electronic parts. We got some good track time in and I really enjoyed riding it.”
Marcel Duinker, Tom Sykes’ Crew Chief: “Over the winter we worked on one of the most important limitations we used to have on the set-up and after testing we made a nice step. At a certain point, however, you have to start on the new season. During the season we understood that we could make another step and had some interesting things to try. During the race weekends we do not have time to make these kinds of adjustments. In testing we do have time and on the first day here we concentrated in two areas and both gave us the results we were expecting. We could not finish our complete schedule but we improved the overall race set-up.”
Pere Riba, Loris Baz’ Crew Chief: “On day one had we had some issues and we lost quite a lot of time but today we got to try some new parts on the chassis side and that was very positive. Lap times were improved compared to the race weekend and Loris was almost as fast with a race tyre today as he had been with his qualifying tyre in the race. His overall rhythm was improved as well and with old tyres we found a better race pace. We will analyse everything now and see the direction for the next races.”
Toni Alfosea, David Salom’s Crew Chief: “We only worked with 2015 material at this test to develop the race bike for the new regulations next year. We worked on the electronics in particular and some parts for the chassis side. The first feelings were OK, and the electronics worked well straight away, but we are only starting work on the chassis settings. We tried many things here and the level of the bike was good for a first test.”
via Kawasaki
