Mahmoud Tannir is a former UAE Sportbike champion; Sport360 will be following his attempts to regain his title with Honda this season.
I found it hard to sleep all week thinking about what I had learned during our two day practice session in Qatar. It was the first time we used the data recording systems. This is high-tech, advanced equipment that allows you to gauge exactly where your performance is at. It was a nice thing to do in order to see where I need to improve as I prepare for this weekend’s fourth round of the Qatar SuperBike Championship.
It all started last Friday when I travelled to Qatar for the practice sessions with my mechanic Julien and friend Vladimir Ivanov (a former Moto2 racer) to test out the data. In brief, the data recording system is an electronic system which you install on the bikes ECU. It can show you your suspension travel and breaking pressure, and it relays the information on to graphs. We have specific software to study the information. From this, we know exactly what we’re doing and at what point of the track.
Whether it’s breaking, opening the throttle, suspension levels or gearing, we can locate the data and see what we’re doing. The more intriguing part is that we can compare it to other data, for example, professional riders or some previous races of mine.
The good thing about the data is that it doesn’t lie. It will show what you’re doing wrong. It identifies areas that need improvement and this is a major advantage as we continue our delightful season so far.
From a riding point of view, the data shows your style of riding. The riding style I’m using at the moment has to be altered in a way that allows us to drop down the lap times. We are losing quite a lot of time on corner entry and exit, and this needs to improve going forward.
Testing out the systems for one day is not enough. We did make little improvements, but we still need to try some different set-ups in the gearing. Hopefully practice will iron that out. I don’t want to push things too much, I just want to understand things step by step.
One main problem we identified was in the set up of the slipper clutch. It was quite heavy so it proved difficult to enter the corner of the track at high speed. It’s an area where I’ve struggled slightly since the start of the season. With the assistance of some teams in Europe, they recommended us to use different springs for the bike. We ordered some and they arrived earlier this week, so it will be nice to test them out ahead of the qualifying round on Friday afternoon.
I spoke to Ian, my crew chief, after the weekend. He took a brief of what we did. In the meantime, we’ve just been setting a plan as to how we can manage the data to try all these new things on Friday in the practice runs. We only have two or three practices on Friday to try these new things before our qualifying round. You can’t get carried away with trying to implement all these new things or you’ll make mistakes. Once I improve in each step, I’ll focus on the next after.
I’m really happy with our campaign to date. Our main goal is always to improve on lap times and every time we go to Qatar, were getting faster and we are going in the right direction.
A win would be great this weekend. I just want to make up for my last time in Qatar and rack up as many points as possible for the team.
