I’ve enjoyed today, which is important to me because at some points last year I really wasn’t enjoying my racing – which is no good as ultimately this is all I’ve ever dreamed of doing!
We haven’t done many laps, which from a physical point of view bodes well as we’ve got another day here and then another two tests. It’s easy to blow your doors off on the first day of testing doing a load of laps and then having no energy – you’ve got to remember you’ve been off a bike all winter!
I had a small crash this morning, which was frustrating, but you have to get it out of the way. It was a silly little crash, which makes it even more frustrating but these things happen. Fortunately, the only damage was to a handlebar grip!
My first flying lap was faster than I’ve ever been around this track on the Ducati and that might sound strange on day one, but back in 2016 the Ducati was a real handful here and I really struggled. I had two laps this morning on a brand new bike just to check everything was working and the quickshifter wasn’t, so I came back in, fixed that and then went 0.7 seconds faster than I’ve ever been here.
I’m really happy that Paul has brought us out here for this test programme, we’ve got two days here, a day off and my team have flown my bike out for me so I can do some cycling on the days off. We’ve got three days at Monteblanco, a new track for me so that’s exciting, and then we go on to Guadix before Donington.
We don’t really have anything major to test, we’ve got some new forks and I’m back testing the swinging arm we worked with last year but it’s really important to get loads of laps to blow out the cobwebs and get back up to speed as that’s something we didn’t have last year and I felt very rusty at round one and with BSB how it is these days you need to be on your best form from round one!