planetearth
There Can Be Only One
Number of posts : 3271
Registration date : 2007-02-03
 |  Subject: Bayliss from Xaus as Valencia test ends.  Tue Mar 20, 2007 8:18 am | |
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- It will be a shock if anyone other than Troy Bayliss wins the Valencia round of the World Superbike championship on April 15 after the Australian once again dominated testing at the Spanish circuit.
The latest two-day official test was attended by all of the leading teams and riders, with the notable exception of world championship leader James Toseland and his Ten Kate Honda team, but reigning double world champion Bayliss was fastest over both days - and on both race and qualifying tyres.
Having set a 1min 34.482secs best on day one, itself well under the official lap record, Bayliss raised the bar with a 1min 34.102secs Monday time set using qualifying tyres. That gave Bayliss a 0.463secs advantage over his nearest rival and was also half-a-second faster than the circuit's official outright best lap set by Neil Hodgson in 2003, but is 0.4secs slower than Troy's own extraordinary performance in testing exactly one year ago.
"It's one year later and I'm going slower so I must be getting old!" joked Bayliss after Monday's extremely windy marathon session. "I've had some pretty good results here in the past as you know, and yesterday morning we got pretty much onto the pace straightaway. In the afternoon the track got a lot warmer and had a lot of wind and we struggled quite a bit. So we really worked hard today and came up with a couple of things in the afternoon and that got me more comfortable and I just leave the test very happy. If we did the race now I'd probably use the tyre I raced on last year because it's very consistent, but who knows what things are like in a month's time. The team worked really hard this weekend and it was a good shake-down both to get me ready for Donington and to give us a good starting-point for the race here in April."
Closest to Bayliss at the close of testing was a flying Ruben Xaus, riding his year-old factory Ducati for the Sterilgarda team... Crash | |
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