Aruba Ducati’s Chaz Davies has been slowly inching his way back towards the race setup he used at Phillip Island’s WorldSBK round last season but says he is closer to the mark in terms of having a bike with which he can challenge reigning champion Jonathan Rea.
The Welshman started the test with the setup he used at the end of last year but because the Australian track is peculiar, Davies a little concerned that huge changes will result in problems.
“It was OK. I wouldn’t say it was fantastic and we are edging back to our race setting from 2016. We came here with what won us races at the end of 2016 but Phillip Island is a different track so we are going to have to back a bit. We’re slowly chipping away at it but I ran out of time in the end to try a few more things, but we are definitely edging closer to the mark,” said Davies, speaking at the track.
““Throughout these tests we’ve been careful, moving step by step without making drastic changes to our base setup but also exploring a little bit given the particular nature of this track, which makes our bike a bit more difficult to turn. We’ve been moving in the right direction and getting progressively more comfortable but there’s still room for improvement.
“We also took different tyres to race distance, and I’m quite happy with our performance as far as that is concerned. We have good ideas about our next steps to take, and we’ll evaluate them on Friday.”
