HRC update for Lorenzo? Bugger that, we’ve got Race Center updates for Jason Male and his gorgeous 2017 Yamaha YZF-R6.
Jason is learning his way as a club racer in the Hartwell Novice championship. Just because he isn’t racing in MotoGP doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve updates specially designed to help his riding style and progression. Yep even novices have a riding style and it’s constantly evolving to. Thus it does need a bit of focus from a bike setup perspective as well.
At the last round of the Hartwell championship at Phillip Island Jason worked closely with Daz and also received help from our own Hot Sauce with Saucy providing invaluable tows in practice.
The key thing we picked up was that Jason’s mid corner speeds was pretty impressive, especially for the lap times he was doing. So it was clear he was losing lap time elsewhere and it didn’t take long for Daz to pin point it. Jason simply brakes too early. Daz, as he does, pointed it out pretty bluntly to Jason 😊
So on top of the standard track walk, specific focus was given on key tactics and skills to allow Jason to brake much later. Over the course of the weekend it certainly improved however there was still so much more to gain in this area. While it all might sound simple it’s not easy to convince yourself to brake 50m later when you’ve never done that before and you are doing speeds in excess of 230km/h. On top of that it’s even harder if you need to show up to work on Monday and have a family to consider too.
So rather than just ask the rider to improve on their own, we decided some updates to the setup of the R6 were needed. Practically the engine brake. The bike is simply slowing down too fast for Jason current ability. The simplest way to change this is to change the bikes engine braking performance. On the R6 this can be done both mechanically, via slipper clutch settings and electronically via the declaration maps in the ECU. In the update for Jason we are using a combination of the 2.
One of the fundamentals we believe in at Race Center, there is no such thing as “the setting” the works for all. There is a base to work from, then it’s about finding the low hanging fruit, the weakest points for each rider. Then come up with the simplest solution to resolve it. We believe simplicity is beautiful. And normally it’s a combination of improvements from bike and rider.
It’s this fundamental philosophy that drives us to be at the race track as often as we are focussing on riders with all levels of abilities.
Can’t wait to see what Jason thinks 😊
