CEV: Moto2 Valencia and Jerez races.

During last two weeks we raced the 2 last CEV rounds (Valencia and Jerez) with the BOTT M211 and David Tirado as rider. As last year we raced integrated in the MEDES team. We also had Lambea as sponsor, this has been a great help in this financial crisis times.

Despite the final results were not very good, we are happy about these 2 races. It is a pity that both were in wet conditions, because this season we made less kilometers than the rest of the teams, so for us it was very important to ride in dry conditions to keep working on the bike setup.

In Valencia race we did quite well, tarmac was wet and David spent the race overtaking riders till he arrived to 11th position few laps before the end. We thought that we had this position in our pocket, but in the last corner of the last lap David crashed. This is the risk of riding in wet conditions, a small mistake that would be just a fright in dry conditions, in wet means a crash.

Despite the disappointment for the crash, we were happy because we almost finished 11th, a position that till now was quite far from us. You must take into account that there were 40 bikes on the grid, and some Moto2 riders and teams coming from World Championship.

We also had more reasons to be happy. Last year we saw that we should improve the top speed of our bike. This year, Jose Contreras, our specialist in engines and electronics spent a lot of hours working with the engine and the fuel and ignition maps, and the work gave its returns, now we were in the upper half of the top speed tables. Jose explains it: “This year in Cheste track we are 10 km/h faster than last year. This is mainly because the improvements we did on the engine, and the mapping. It is also due to the Arrow exhaust we are using, which improves the engine breathing in medium and top rpm range. This small details are very important in this category in which everything is so close.”

From Valencia we went to Jerez, home track of David Tirado. He is always very fast in Jerez.
On Friday the free sessions were on dry conditions and David lapped in 1:46. It was the first time that our bike was so fast, previously our best times were always 47s. On Friday there are not official times in the CEV, so we didn’t know which was our position on the timetables. We thought that lapping in 46 we were in the top ten.
Unfortunately on saturday it was raining, so the qualifying practices were under the rain and we went quite back in the timetables.. 27th on the grid.

On Sunday the race was also wet. During the first laps David took it easy and once he had some confidence he started lapping faster, improving his saturday times by 3 seconds, and lapping close to the race head times. He gained some positions and finished the race 20th.

After these 2 races, we start working to prepare next season, with the intention of achieving the necessary budget to race the whole season. We are very happy with David Tirado work, and we hope to continue with him as a rider for 2012. We will keep informing about how everything goes on.

We want to thank Pep Pujol for the cool photos he took in both races. You can see the photos at higher resolution in our Flickr gallery.