Chaz Davies
Hi guys, getting ready to miss racing? With BSB all wrapped up, us with one round left and, as I write, MotoGP with two, we’re already getting to that racing-free time of year. Sucks, right? Don’t worry, I’ll answer for you, yes it does but aside from a testing ban our work will start nearly right after our final round in Qatar. Which, by the way, I ammost looking forward to.
So when I last left you guys we’d had our round at Portimao and were heading to France, which was a bit so-so to be honest. In 2016 Magny Cours was great for me and my guys, and we did in fact complete the double win there in two very different kinds of races. One wet then drying, the other dry, and it appeared as though we’d have similar circumstances yet again.
I did a track walk with Charlie Hiscott this time around, and it was fun, Charlie says I explain stuff really well, er, apparently! Practice kind of went okay, but in qualifying I could only manage the front of the third row. I’ve always been more a racer than qualifier, and while I’ve definitely improved over the last couple of years, it could still be better even if it is only for the first race’s grid position.
Like last year it was wet and looked to stop raining, but this time around there would be no clever gamble, it was wets all the way. I kind of got a good start, and things were okay for a couple of laps, but then the weirdness started. Even now we’re still not sure exactly why, but the tyre became really hard to manage all of a sudden. The rear was locking going into turns, and then spinning too much coming out them. And it wasn’t something that could be countered by adding more traction-control for the exits either as then we’d lose what drive we still had. Tenth place sucked, really hard, but quite honestly it was all I could do to bring it home upright and looking at it from that perspective, it actually wasn’t a bad result.
It did, of course, give me a lot of motivation to make amends on Sunday. Starting from eleventh place I made moves lap after lap before hitting the front. I saw that Jonny Rea had got caught up in something, but then the rain started to come down, then stop, then come down again. It was hard to know exactly how hard to push so I tried to remain consistent. I let the chasing Yamahas within a certain distance then just tried to control the gap, while missing all the wet patches! But we managed it, and after a properly bitter Saturday it sure was one sweet Sunday celebration!
Speaking of bitter, we learned not long after that one of our bosses, Ernesto Marinelli would be leaving Ducati after decades of service, and therefore our WSB team, too. I wish him all the best, he’s been brilliant to me and for Ducati. In between France and the next race I also got to visit one of the main global cloud data centres of our lead sponsor Aruba.it, and my word, how bloody impressive is that place? I can’t even begin to fathom the sheer volume of digital storage there, never mind all the combined processing power the place has (90MW, whatever that means!) – it’s truly phenomenal, and was a real insider look into what exactly it takes to keep the internet, which we all take for granted, running as it does.
Anyway, Jerez our next race, hmmm... The track had been resurfaced for the first time in as long as I can remember, and it did throw a curve ball our way regarding setup. Then another weird thing happened at the start of practice, with my bike seeming to lock up into the last corner, and chucking me off in a really peculiar way. The bummer was that we missed the entire session, when track time was essential to understanding the new surface. This meant we struggled in qualifying, third row again, and I eventually finished second to Jonny after my team-mate Marco also had a weird (also weirdly similar to mine) issue going into turn one while holding a decent lead. Still, second was good as my goal is to catch and pass Tom Sykes to finish second in the series. Sunday came, and I got caught out at turn three like a domino, after one rider clipped another, who clipped me and down we went.
But a red flag meant that I could restart, and even though I managed to get into second place with so little setup time it was a struggle to hold it, and Marco came through on me with a couple of laps left. Still, I was in front of Tom so it’s all to play for to see who finishes runner-up to Jonny in Qatar. Which you may already know about by the time you read this!