After Assen, I guess it kind of felt I’d gone in to semi retirement. I really felt I’d achieved everything I’d ever wanted to do on a race bike, winning a championship and racing abroad are two fairly major boxes to tick! All through the summer of ’06 Spidey sat in the corner of the workshop and although I went and watched some of the NG  rounds, helping my good friend Adam Tempest along the way to help him take over the Sound of Thunder crown from me, I never felt I was missing out. I enjoyed the 6 hour endurance, where I shared the bike for an hour at a time with Ricky, but even though it was mentally and physically tough, it was no-where near as intense as a 9 lap club race. Still, my times around Pembrey even when I was exhausted at the end of three hours of riding were still pretty respectable (often in the 1.03s when I had a clear run) so it kind of made me realise I still had something in me. Talking me into doing the final NG round of the year didn’t take much. If fact it kind of went “you ought to do the Thruxton race”, “Er, OK!”.

Thruxton is a bit of an odd place, very fast, very wide and very bumpy. It was only a one day meeting and it was a bid odd because Big C had his boys that weekend and because it was all a bit last minute, it didn’t have the full on team presence that we’d had in ’05. Still, Pete and Zo were there to look after me and Rick had decided to give the Liza (Liza Minelli; Benelli!) a dust off, and he was parked alongside. I have to say that I impressed myself with my riding. After being off the bike for quite a while, I made my way though from the back of the grid (the penalty for a late entry) and managed to get myself up to 3rd in the qualifier. Riding around the fast blind section of the track, I felt that I almost had more racetrack than anyone else was allowed to see, a testament to the visual skills lessons learnt at my California Superbike School  level 2 I’d done in ’04. I was riding around the outside of people, including the newly crowned Adam at the fastest, scariest part of the track. The only trouble I had was on the full throttle, flat out run up the hill to the final part of the track, where the bike was so unstable I was having to feather the throttle to stop it going into a full on lock to lock tank slapper. Pete and I adjusted the attitude of the bike to help counteract this somewhat disconcerting situation, firstly by lowering the rear of the bike and raising the front, which although technically should have helped with the geometry, it didn’t work. We then tried raising the rear and lowering the front to get more weight over the front wheel but that didn’t work either. For the SoT final we put it back to a more level state and softened the suspension to try to give it an easier time over the bumps. That didn’t work either. I was still riding well but towards the end of the race, just as I’d gone around the outside of a new NG runner, Graham Goodyear on his Ducati 999, the rear tyre let go and the back end came around on me so far that I just knew I was about to be in a lot of pain. I think it was this realisation and acceptance that I was going to have a big crash that I kind of relaxed and although I was out of the saddle and was totally winded when I landed back on the bike, it came back in to line still on its wheels. I limped it back across the line and breathed a massive sigh of relief! Graham came over to me afterwards, “Whoa, the black line you left out there was as long as your truck, I can’t believe you saved it!”

The only trouble with finishing a day like that is that it asks more questions than it answered. Had the bike simply reached the end of its development and wasn’t capable of being pushed that hard? I mean, it is basically a 1998 machine and the first big bike Aprilia had ever produced. Even though I had probably developed it more than anyone else has ever done, maybe the basic chassis design was only capable of handling so much. The big Dunlop slicks were developed around the latest machinery with the latest suspension systems and may simply have been overwhelming the bike’s ability to keep things under control. At least I knew I was still capable of riding fast: Probably not such a good thing actually! I mean, if I’d been struggling to ride at a decent pace, then what with the bike misbehaving so much, retirement would have been pretty easy. But knowing I was riding well, at least as well as the front guys, I couldn’t help wondering what I would be like on a modern bike. I had ridden one of the new Fireblades around Donington at the Ron Haslam School  and was stunned at how easy it was to ride quickly. It steering was light, it ‘flicked’ through the bends, the brakes were excellent and it was so stable it was bordering on being boring! I spent the day wishing my instructor would pick his pace up but still managed to do a 1.49s lap of the full circuit. Not bad for a totally standard bike on road tyres. So, what should I do. Retire? Nah, not yet! Chop in Spidey for a younger model? Hmm, I did consider it. For about 30 seconds! Spidey and I were too much of a team and had achieved too much together, besides, I’m not getting any younger so may not have too many years left in me. Maybe, with a bit of testing somewhere familiar, we could get to the bottom of this handling issue and at least make it a bit more controlled. Talking me into doing the BikeSport News  Autumn Championship didn’t take much. If fact it kind of went “you ought to do the November Pembrey race”, “Er, OK!”.

Just turning up at our ‘home’ track (ok it is 170miles away but Pembrey still feels like home as we’ve been there so often) with the team back together again made everything seem good. Waking up Saturday morning to frost on the windscreen of the bike did make me wonder what on earth I was doing there on November the 5th. I mean, bonfire night is a time of wrapping up in coats and scarves and here I was pulling on a set of leathers! We had a free practice first thing in the morning, and places of the track in the shadows were decidedly icy! We then had a timed qualifying session, a novelty for an NG round, in order to get our grid positions. Still very cold so it was hard to gauge how fast to go but my 1.05 put me 5th on the grid for the weekend, second row on the outside which I was happy with. By the time of the first race, the sun was out and it was like a summer’s day. We spent the whole weekend enjoying the weather and enjoying being a team again. Ricky had brought along his BIG stereo to add to the atmosphere too! A broken throttle cable in the Open race showed what a good team we are. With only 15 minutes before our main race we removed the saddle, the fuel tank and the airbox, replaced the cable, rebuilt it all, and had it fuelled and ready to go with time to spare. We also worked through some suspension settings, gradually calming the bike down. It was still shaking but we went from having it starting to shake on the exit of Honda Curve (the last bend before the start/finish straight) and wobbling all of the way down towards the hairpin, to it not shaking till most of the way down the straight, just before I hit the brakes. We’d ran out of adjustment on the rear shock by the end of the weekend but we did end up with a 1.01.33 lap which was the fastest I’ve ever been around the track there! Amazingly for a meeting in November, the pace of the entire field was fast and although I wasn’t the fastest, my consistency netted me 3rd overall in what they called the ‘Autumn Championship’ and had a podium photo complete with a bottle of champagne for our efforts!

That meeting really gave us some direction for the winter rebuild. I knew I wanted to try to do the whole NG  season in ’07 so the bike came apart in readiness. The forks went back to K-tech  for a service, as did the rear shock which I asked them to re-valve to give me a greater range of compression damping. The motor went off to Frank Wrathall for a refresh and to re-set the cam timing. After much research, I sent the fork yokes off to Roger Allmond  (famed Custom bike Engineer) asking him to reduce the offset in them by pushing out the steering stem, alloy welding the holes, re-machining the holes 5mm further forward and pressing the steering stem back in. This would increase the trail of the motorcycle and should increase stability and the bike’s natural ability to ‘right’ itself after a wobble. In the meantime I set to work cleaning, greasing, adjusting and preparing every other nut and bolt on the bike. I also needed a new colour scheme! A bit of internet searching found the trailer to the forthcoming Spiderman 3 movie and my decision was made.

Why the Spiderman theme? Well, when I got the bike initially (way back in 2000 I think!), all I did was put a fibreglass bodykit on it and paint it in the first colour I had, yellow. Although I’m known for my paintwork I thought that if I just did something simple, I wouldn’t mind if it got damaged so leaving me to enjoy riding hard without worrying about trashing it! It didn’t take long before I got bored with the yellow scheme and the trackday and raceday photos didn’t look their best as my leathers were red and black at the time. It was almost a relief when I finally did crash it as it gave me a blank canvas to work with. It was at the time of the first Spiderman movie and at one of the MotoGP rounds that year, Marco Melandri, riding a 250 Aprilia at the time, had his bike painted in the webbed-up red and blue colours to promote the new film. I stumbled across a photo of it in one of the bike magazines and someone behind me said, “hey, I bet you couldn’t paint a bike like that”. The rest, as they say, is history! It was  so instantly recognisable and so popular(especially with the 'shorties' in the paddock!) that it has stuck. At least no-one ever has to worry about what to get me for birthday or Christmas presents, any Spiderman merchandise will do! To go with the half black/half red scheme this year, I fitted the team out with red shirts for the boys, black shirts for the girls and gave them all two pairs (red and black) of Converse All Stars shoes, with the message ‘red on the right’. Excessive? Yes, but if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth over-doing! The shoes got their first outing at the NG Marshall’s do early in the year and although the paint scheme was still a secret, it gave everyone a little taster of what was to some.

As usual, with an entire winter to get everything ready, the week before our first test day of the season was when we finally got the engine back and started fitting it back in the bike! We headed up to a damp Silverstone but weather predictions of ‘it may get better’ were totally wrong and the rain got heavier and heavier throughout the day. At least we all got to do a few sessions. By ‘all’ I mean RG Pete on his ZX6, Ricky on the Liza, Sian on her ZXR400 and Beccie on her R6 in readiness for her first ever race! Big C was on hand to give advice and Zoe and Tracy lent a hand too. The wet track meant I couldn’t push the bike hard enough to see if there was any improvement in stability but at least it did show that the engine was ok and it all stayed together all day. It looked awesome too!

NG round 1 at Silverstone was a bit of a disappointment. Again, I was pleased with my riding but it was soon evident that the instability problem was still there. With a limited amount of time in the paddock and very little track time, we tried some more adjustments but at one point it catapulted me out of the seat on the transition from a left to right flick and I ended up with my foot wedged under the bellypan as I tried to get around the corner! Whatever adjustment we made it seemed to get worse and worse and although I equalled my best lap time around there in the morning, I couldn’t get near it again as the day went on and finished the Sound of Thunder Final in a frustrating 6th. It may have only been a 50 minute drive home but it seemed an awful long way.

The first thing I did the following morning was to book the test day on the Friday prior to the NG Rounds 2 /3 at Pembrey. The track has always been my performance benchmark and this would be the decider. If I couldn’t sort it out there with a day’s worth of track time, I felt sure I wouldn’t be able to sort it out anywhere. In the meantime I went back through the bike to try to understand what was going on. I did find that the steering bearing nuts were loose, not because they hadn’t been done up but because the modified yokes weren’t clamping down on them stopping them unwinding. This was easily solved with a small spacer and could have accounted for the degradation in the stability. Ricky and I then worked through a whole load of suspension adjustments on the rear, trying to understand what effects one adjustment had on all the other settings. For example, we found that even a small amount or rear preload soon overwhelmed the amount of rebound damping (hence the springing me out of the seat experience at Silverstone perhaps) that was dialled in. And there wasn’t much rebound damping dialled in at all. We had asked K-tech to dyno the shock before and after their re-valving work and to send it back set exactly the same but with more range of adjustment but either they didn’t do that quite or it was short on damping when I sent it to them. Although it is impossible at this level to set suspension by bouncing on it in a workshop (and anyone that says they can do so without it being ridden is telling fibs!), it can at least put it in the ballpark. Ricky and I spent a lot of time analysing and recording the effects and between us came up with a base setting. We set the attitude of the bike to give us 25 degrees steering head angle as a starting point too. I did try to measure the weight distribution with the bike on two sets of bathroom scales with me sat on it in my riding position, and then did the same with the front raised 50mm which, with a clever bit of maths, should determine the height of the centre of gravity. The laughing at me trying to balance on the scales with the bike in a ‘wheelie’ position was one thing but the general disbelief in what I was trying to measure, coupled with scales that weren’t capable of measuring the bike’s weight accurately made me give in on that. Something for the future though, I’m sure. When no body’s watching!

I did spend a week in a dilemma over tyres too. The bike has been unstable ever since I fitted the Dunlop ‘balloon’ slicks; the 195/70ZR17 rear is a massively oversized tyre but gives an immense amount of sidegrip. As soon as I fitted them at Donington back in ’04 the normally rock solid stable machine was transformed into an evil monster! The only trouble was that it instantly allowed me to lap significantly faster, which, at the end of the day, is the most important thing. So, the question was, do I stick with the Dunlops, loads of cornering grip but not allowing me to use full throttle when upright because of the instability, or do I try the more conventional sized Michelin which yes, offer a bit less grip but would allow me to use more throttle down the straights. Michelin? Dunlop? Michelin? Dunlop? Michelin? Dunlop? “CHRIS, what should I do???!!”. “Stick to what you know.” “oh, OK, thanks!”. Decision made.

So all that was left was to load up for Pembrey. With our fingers crossed……