Jerez 2011

Danny woke up to a wet race day in Jerez and in the morning warm up session soon settled down to tuning the bike to the wet track.

Things progressed well and Danny finished the session 11th fastest and looking forward to the up coming wet race.

Starting from 19th on the grid Danny soon settled into an impressive pace.

Soon Danny was picking off places and, with a little help from other riders slipping off in the wet conditions, worked his way up to the edge of the top 10.

Then, on lap 13, with a strong field closing in on him, Danny had a 'highside' and rolled dramatically into the gravel trap concluding his race.

After a check up at the circuit clinic, Danny returned to his garage with a few bruises and a damaged pride, but otherwise fine.

Danny said:

"I started well, but the group was coming at me from behind, and I was pushing very hard to keep ahead. My back tyre was sliding ... maybe the setting was a bit soft. Then it suddenly let go and I spun out. I’m not badly hurt, and at least it was a strong race, and I can come back stronger for the next one. These things happen."

More pics can be seen here.

Qualifying started around midday and the team had fitted a new engine into Danny's bike.

On his second lap Danny had a problem with the engine which resulted in Danny pushing his bike back to his garage and he had not yet set a time that would qualify him for tomorrows race.

The team did a great job in finding and resolving the problem and gave Danny just 10 minutes in which to set a qualifying time.

In typical Danny style, he just went for it setting a qualifying time on his first full lap, then went on to improve the time finishing 19th in the times.

Danny said:

'I was running the engine in at the start of the session when it stopped. I had a long push back to the pits, but the crew did a fantastic job to fix it. I went out again with less than ten minutes to go with a bit of a hot head, and it seemed to pay off.'

Pictures from today in Jerez can be seen here.

Jerez the first European round

The European season started today with the second round of the season at Jerez

After a slightly disapointing result in Qatar, having missed scoring the teams first world championship points in their debut race by 0.3 secs, Danny was raring to go in Jerez.

In FP1 the bike was running well and Danny was hovering around 15th on the time sheet.

In the later session (FP2) the team tried a revised engine and suspension setup.

Danny said:

The bike felt good in the first session and between the sessions we tried a revised engine and suspension setup, unfortunately we were going in the wrong direction and will revert back tomorrow.

It's not a bad thing, if you don't try to improve, you won't. So we tried something and now we know it doesn't work here, so we now know more and can move on.

I'm looking forward to further progress tomorrow.