Gaz Johnson ....................................
Top tales from our TT star
Hey there everyone. Well, the usual things have been going on since last month; I’ve been really busy at the shop and sorting stuff out with the racing. We have been racing No Limits Endurance at Anglesey circuit. It’s strange having never raced there or trackday’d there before in all the years I’ve been racing, so I was quite excited to get a run round the place. As an added bonus it was my first time out on the CFMOTO lightweight bike too. The great thing about riding one of these bikes is with it being a little bit slower it gives you more time to have a look out on the circuit and learn it, and also to admire the view coming back down towards the Corkscrew. The spec of bike I was on was a standard 700 engine in a full spec lightweight chassis. It meant I had to push really hard and override to try and keep with the lads up front, but that’s not always a bad thing in racing.
My first race was on the Delkevic BMW and the team put it on pole which was really good and a bit of a confidence boost, although I was arguably the slowest member in the team. I still wanted to be more comfortable on the track for being able to get through the traffic at race pace. Come the race we got off to a decent start and were holding third before working up to second, when a red flag came out. On the restart the instruction was to get in the lead and pull a good gap, so in the last changeover the time loss over the Lodge brothers (who wouldn’t need to stop) could be made back up by James Edwards (and our strongest qualifier). So like the good little boy I always am, I went out and got in the lead and set the fastest laps of the endurance with a strong stint before pitting for James to swap. It was probably our fastest pit stop to date, sending James out just a couple of seconds off Lodgey into second to then gain the lead before another red flag cut it short by only a few laps. We took our first win by 2.8 seconds. That’s the team’s first win in the endurance, but I’ve gotta say a massive well done to James and Jonathan Lodge running the one bike for three hours and in all that heat!
The rest of that weekend was then down to riding the CFMOTO bike where I pulled a couple of podiums, but the bike was running at such a high temperature in that heat with the standard small 650 radiator, (new bigger 700 ones arrived the other day), so happy days but it meant it was stifling power as the race went, but that didn’t stop me from having a great time. In the last race though I got to ride Michael Booth’s bike which has a lightweight spec engine and bigger airbox on, making a good bit more power, but with my fairing on, unfortunately again it was running super-hot. We are now having some more development done on the rads to stop us losing so much power.
The young lad leading all the races was a kid called Oliver Barr on my mate Jessop’s old TT bike. He was riding really well and it was good to have a battle with him, and also to give us a yardstick on where the CFMOTO needs to be at before going to the TT.
The end game for me and having a dealership for CFMOTO now is to have reliable TT competitive bikes available to the club racers at an affordable price that you can get through my shop, because some of the bikes pricewise in the class are just out of this world now. At least, that’s the plan. Next up is the Donington 800km race in a few weeks so the Delkevic team best be in tip-top condition for that as it’s a long race. I’ll also be looking forward to seeing what the next steps of development make on the CFMOTO. Catch you soon.