Yamaha's Noriyuki Haga goes into this weekend's World Superbike meeting at Brno with two things on his mind. The first is to keep up a steady point score and the second is an itchy collarbone!
The Samurai of Slide, who underwent surgery on the broken bone in America after his crash and subsequent heroic second race at Miller Motorsport Park, is confident of some good results after getting useful data from the recent tests at Vallelunga.
"My physical situation is better but where I broke my collarbone is kind of ‘itchy’, I think because it is healing," he said. "For Brno I have to work hard to keep the points scores high and move up. We had a decent test at Vallelunga recently, and got good results when running a full race set-up, so we are happy with that, of course. Our goal this weekend is consistency while staying fast.
"For Brno practice has been good in the past but some of the races have gone a strange way. But for sure we cannot lose any more points. We need some more consistent races now.”
Team manager Massimo Meregalli also revealed that some new parts, tested at Vallelinga,might well be ready for the bikes come Friday morning. He said: "We may have the new Akrapovic exhausts for Brno that we found improvements with at Vallelunga, but there has not been very much time for Akrapovic to make the numbers so it’s not confirmed at this point. They are trying very hard as always. No matter what, we are ready and we will be out to make up some ground this weekend."