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After months of waiting and Team Virgin Mobile Aiwa and their two riders Simon Crafar and Steve Plater kicked off the 2002 British Superbike season at Almeria in Southern Spain.
Riding what will be the final version on the new R1 Superbike, both Crafar and Plater went faster on the new R1 than the team had been in previous years on the R7 at the same circuit.
At every session from the first day until the Team finished on the Friday, each rider improved on their times, finally matching the times recorded by the British Champion, John Reynolds at the Spanish circuit only 2 weeks before.
The settings the Team tried on the R1 varied in the extreme in an effort to find the settings that best suited the as yet untested bike. All of the effort put in by the mechanics and the Teams two riders paid off, with each adjustment making an improvement in the R1’s performance.
Simon Crafar said ‘we lost a fair amount of track time because in my first laps the handling felt cumbersome, like a big road bike. We had to make some big suspension changes, which made a huge difference and I really didn’t expect it to be this good first time out. We overlaid the data from the R7 and the R1 and I was amazed to find the R1 was faster than the R7 at all but one of the corners’
