Lloyd Hopkinson from the JJL Superbike team gave me a call and asked if I’d like to test one of his Superbikes at Almeria in Spain.
Danny Beaumont raced JJL’s Honda Fireblades in 2005 and is staying with the team in 2006.
Lloyd asked me to do a little development work on his bikes for the coming season; he is very keen to run me alongside Danny but still has to find the funding for this to happen.
It was a Honda test with most of the main UK Honda teams present and the Ten-Kate World team. Three days of testing had been booked for us all and the forecast was dry, temperature wasn’t going to be the best but better than the UK and good to be back on a Superbike.
Day-1 was nice and warm with a track temperature of around 16 degrees, got myself settled into the circuit once again and started working through various settings. Didn’t feel mega quick but the engines were well up on mileage.
Day-2 was quite a bit colder, around 8 degrees track temperature but warm enough to keep working through the teams schedule and also some tyre testing with Dunlop.
Day-3 was colder again, 6 degrees track temperature and Danny had a massive high-side damaging his bike very badly just before lunch. This made Lloyd very nervous with the temperature quite low so we called it a day mid-afternoon.
Shame Danny crashed as I wanted to test his bike back to back with the one I was riding, it had Ohlins and mine had WP suspension but that was destroyed in the crash.
They have asked me to test again before the season starts but that will depend on my own plans for the coming season, hopefully I’ll have my ride finalised very soon!
