Tannir: Building on second place finish in UAE

Mahmoud Tannir 20:12 19/04/2015
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  • Disappointed: The authorities postponed the last race of the season.

    I would have loved to challenge for the UAE Sportsbikes Championship title, but the final race of the season was postponed because of the recent sandstorm and then the organisers opted to cancel the race completely as they said the next three weekends would lead into May which may be too hot for the riders. For me it didn’t make sense – as the final round of the Qatar SuperBike Championship takes place around a similar time in May.

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    To finish second in the championship is still a great achievement and it’s something the team and I will continue to build on for next season’s campaign. I’m enjoying my racing more as we approach the final round of the Qatar SuperBike Championship ​at the Losail International Circuit in three weeks. In the lead up to the final leg, I’ve adopted a different mentality – keeping positive and relaxing more – rather than searching for a specific lap time.

    I was struggling a little bit mentally in previous rounds, so adopting this mindset has allowed me to get back on the podium again and regain some confidence.

    From a bike point of view, our aim is to finish the season the way we started. There are minor problems that we’ll attempt to rectify over the next few weeks in order to be as best prepared for our season defining race.

    The power deficit problem came to my attention during the previous round in Qatar where I felt a dip in the performance of the bike. The last time we worked on this part of the bike was at the beginning of the season, and with temperature increasing over the last number of weeks, it’s affected the dyno. As a result, we need to see how much power we’ve lost and what we can do to rectify it before the race.

    We need proper time to work through the engine and the gears, and make sure the fuelling is correct. The engine is running smoothly, and thankfully we’ve had no issues at all since the autumn. Normally there is a lot of stress on a racing engine, and added to this is the fact that we competed in two tough championships over the last few months.

    Some of the bikes in Qatar in the 600cc event are quite a bit faster than mine, especially on the straight. Losail International Circuit is a fast track and the straight is nearly a kilometre, a point that could prove to be the difference between winning and losing if your bike lacks sufficient power.

    Another issue is to work on the strategy of the engine braking in my bike. We didn’t have the chance to look into it as our experience is limited on the use of the software. This is software provided by the HRC (Honda Racing Corporation), and it allows you to connect to the ECU of the bike and change parameters that control the engine, fuelling and engine breaking.

    In Qatar, Tannir noticed a power deficit problem with his bike.

    With the bike, what’s happening is that my engine has a standard braking strategy, and that means, if you come from a full throttle to a corner and brake, the engine braking starts to work and it decelerates to make the bike lose speed. There are certain parameters in that software that allow the engine braking strategy to change; it could be aggressive or soft, depending on every rider’s style.

    Some like more engine braking so they can stop the bike a lot more and then fire it out of the corner faster, whereas other riders would like to have more corner speed and for them it makes more sense to have more engine braking at the beginning. This helps you carry more speed going into the corner, which suits more the 600s and, in particular, my speed of riding as I’m more of a corner speed style of rider.

    So, after a long season with many twists and tales, 17 points separate me from winning the Qatar SuperBike Championship title. It’ll be a challenge, but in racing anything can happen. It would be great to cap off our first season in Qatar with a championship win, but otherwise I’m happy to end the year on a high with two second place finishes.  With this, there is the hope that we can go one better next year.

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