James Ellison of Hydrex Bike Animal Honda has consistently been finishing in the top ten whilst challenging riders at the front, successfully taking one podium so far this season and on a close-to-stock bike.
Ellison has up to now avoided using his second bike with the electronic setup due to lack of testing and to limit points damage to his championship challenge. To find that extra power needed to bring him closer to the front runners he has now moved to his second bike.
Ellison said: “Things are going not too bad, we have two bikes, a standard kit bike and another one which has all the electronics on it. We have been running the standard bike and what we did was at Mallory was used the other bike, but because of the lack of time to test it slowed me down.”
“We took it again to Mallory on Wednesday and it worked awesome, then we put some new components in, came here and it's not right. When I'm opening the throttle it cuts out at certain points. We have to work on the power delivery balance between the hand, throttle and rear tyre, it's a bit hit and miss at the moment and currently I am a second off the pace.”
Talking about the difference between the bikes he said: “It's no different, it's just that the electronics can give you more power if it is fine tuned. We are still not using traction control as you need to get the bike working first.”
Talking about his year so far Ellison said: “It is going alright, it's been a lot of so close yet so far. We have been running really well, but then we come into problems and things don't end as we hoped.”
“Earlier in the year we had problems with the tyre spinning on the rim, which then unbalances the tyre and causes chatter. We did have that problem at Donington and I truly feel we could have won it or at least should have had a podium, we were comfortable enough.”
Ellison knocked a further half a second off his morning practice time this afternoon and is 0'01.214s off the leader Karl Harris of Rob Mac Racing. He will be looking to improve on his results he obtained earlier in the season in May at this track where he obtained an eighth and a podium finish of second place.