Milwaukee Aprilia’s Eugene Laverty has said the RSV4 he now has is comparable to the 2013 version on which he won races but there is still a lot more work to be done as the WorldSBK competition is at least a second faster than it was four years ago.
Laverty ended the opening day of action at Donington in 12th place and missed an automatic Superpole two slot. He said the best the bike felt was with a full fuel load in a new fuel tank brought to the track yesterday but after that the feeling got worse as the weight over the front of the bike got less and less.
“Today a bit rubbish. I’m not very happy as the best bike I had today was in the first laps and then it went in the wrong direction. It shouldn’t be that your first five laps are the best feeling and then after that it gets worse. My main problem is I can’t stop and we couldn’t improve it, so I lost two hours,” said Laverty, speaking to bikesportnews.com.
“The bike is better now than where we were. At Assen, Aragon and Imola, it is comparable to where we were in 2013 but the guys are going a second faster so we need to get our finger out and get after them. We’ve got a new tank which has put the weight in a different place and that changed the bike quite a lot - that’s what I was happy with - but that was on the first run.”
