The morning was plagued with rain. At least it was a light rain. Michelle had never been in the rain so this track days was a perfect was for her to get some experience. Our morning started out with some tire changes to get her bike setup for the rain. Yves had spent a great deal of time in the rain recently in the opening round of the RACE superseries so he opted to focus on helping Michelle with riding feedback and setup. Michelle was actually the only rider out on the track for the first half hour. Furthermore, less than a handful of riders actually went to play in the rain. Her initial lap times were as you would expect for first time out on rain tires. But as she got in more and more laps, she picked up the pace and cleaned up her lines. Unfortunately, another learning curve is also quickly experienced in rain riding and that’s traction limits. Michelle suffered a crash when setting up for turn 5 (hairpin) of the Pro track. She is not 100% sure of what exactly she did wrong but from other riders behind her, it seems she may have been a bit abrupt on either brakes or body movements when setting up for her turn. She lost the front with very little lean angle, which means she slapped down on the track hard injuring her knee. The bike only had some minor damages but Michelle was not in the best of conditions to return to the track that day.
Yves had the opportunity to do a few sessions in the afternoon. The track was still damp but Yves opted to run on the Pirelli Super Corsa tires. Traction was limited and caused the rear to step out and drift for the first few laps until the tires came up to temp. Thanks to the Penske rear shock recently installed, the rear wheel would hook-up smoothly and allow Yves to get good feel from the bike when experiencing rear-wheel spin. Yves’ laptimes continued to get better as the conditions improved. By late afternoon, despite the cool track, tires approaching 200 laps and limited gearing, Yves was consistently and significantly faster than his 2004 personal best laptime on this circuit.
Michelle hopes to be better in time for her opening round.
My first qualifier started mid/late afternoon. The rain was still coming down. I lined up on the front row. I wasn’t very confident as I suffered a very big and fast high-side in turn one, one year ago at this exact round in similar conditions. I got an acceptable start and somewhat kept my position. I got passed by a bike or two but I didn’t really care. I knew I just wanted to repeat my practice performance and simply qualify. Within a couple of laps, the bikes started to crash. A couple of bikes started to go down in turn 5 which is a scary corner in the wet. However, those bikes slid across the width of the corner dropping gasoline and oil all over the corner. Next lap around, I see another rider go down in that corner, than another, etc… Many more leaving more oil and gas on that corner. We could barely go thru that corner without sliding even when the bikes were straight up. Scary stuff!!! I managed to survive this crash fest and finished 10th for my split qualifier which put me 20th for my two Superbike starts. What a crappy qualifier!
Next came my 600 final. I was excited about this one cause I would start from the 4th row with many of my fast friends. This would allow me to go very fast through corner one and detach myself from the slower riders. Light goes green and I got a good launch. I start looking for a way through the riders in front of me. And then bang! A friend of mine in front of me gets tangled with another rider just before corner one. He goes down hard and now I have him and his bike sliding in front of me. I throw my hand up and brake hard. I managed to avoid and miraculously, the remaining field of bikes managed to avoid hitting him too. I got passed by many bikes and I was sure RACE would stop the race. But no red flag and the race was on. But it took too long for me to gather myself and make up those lost spots. So another mediocre finish for me with a 14th place.My last race was the 2nd leg of my Superbike race at 4:30pm. Just to annoy me further, it started to rain just before the race. Lucky for us, we had brought Michelle’s R6 so we setup her bike for rain. I had tested on it on Friday and it performed rather well. No one knew what tires to choose. The ground was wet and the sun was trying to come through but there were still some menacing clouds in the sky. Dry setup is what we chose. I get to my crappy 20th place starting point and notice most of us are on dries but some on wets. I get another acceptable launch but I get stuck again in traffic going into corner one losing more positions. I wasn’t sure about my traction on lap 1 and 2 as the track was wet. I kept pushing hard. By lap 3, the track was dry. Then I started to apply the pressure. And I also remembered how to pass people!!! So I went onto the attack passing as many riders as I could as quickly as I could. Michelle noticed that after passing a rider, I would open up a massive gap very quickly. My pace was fast and I was solid on the bike. Unfortunately, there is not much you can do in 8 laps when you have a bad start. So 13th place was the best I could deliver. I would have probably been in the top 10 if the race would have been 12 laps as originally scheduled.
We had rushed like mad to get the bikes ready for this day. We actually finished worked on the bikes at 10:30pm the night before. So getting up at 4:00am was a little hard on the body. We got there at 7:30am which was good timing for registration. We were 3rd in line. After that, we made our way to the Fabi pits and were able to find a spot with some friends right on pit lane. Michelle’s bike was the first one sent to tech. We knew that the best time for an open track was early in the morning. Glad we did that as the track got VERY busy throughout the day. So busy that we skipped our late afternoon sessions. None of us could get a clean lap and were just playing in a freight-train of bikes. Besides, we were both running on tires which had in excess of 100laps on them. So we didn’t mind the early end to our day as it gave us a chance to talk to friends we hadn’t seen all winter.
We left for Tremblant at 5:30am on Thursday as it is only a couple of hours from Ottawa, Ontario. I was teamed up for the weekend with a fellow friend and racer, Pat Boyd of Team Shoulder Check (Ottawa Safety Council). We had my trailer loaded with his R6, my GSX-R600, about a dozen sets of tires (too many of which were rain tires as rain was in the forecast for Thursday and Saturday) and tons of gear/equipment. We loaded my trailer from top to bottom. Definitely the heaviest load I have done up to date. We arrived at Tremblant around 8:00am only to be welcomed by rain. The place was already pretty packed but another fellow racer had reserved us some space. We barely had time to setup our canopies before another big downpour. Then we had to ride our bikes to tech which was at the other end of the paddock. By then, we were wet head to toe. After tech I installed some rain tires as we were up at 10:30am and it was definitely going to be wet. Pat had been on this track the year before so he said he would show me the lines around the track. We both went out and took a scenic ride around the track at a mellow 2:30.292 as a best time. Heck that placed me 12th in that session out of only 22 riders out there.