10/12/06 – 2007 Is Almost Upon Us
It appears that there is no longer any chance of a break in the off season simply because there isn’t an off season. The mad rush to get sponsorship before the date the contracts had to be in meant we simply ran out of time to put all our plans in to action. In the end we were only able to enter one SuperStock 1000 ride and one SuperStock 600 for Matt Bond and Daniel Brill, respectively.
The team would still like to have additional riders but without having secured the necessary sponsorship to fund them we are not willing to take the risk that we cannot afford to run them as once contracts are signed and entries are paid there is no way we could back out if the funds weren’t available. We will keep working on the sponsorship angle in the hope we may get a late entry for another rider, or two, and whilst there are a couple of companies that seem interested in working with us we still don’t have anything to announce at this time.
In the meantime Matt went to Jerez in Spain with Racedays.net back in November. Whilst he didn’t have a bike to ride he did get the opportunity of a couple of sessions on Steve Jordan’s GSXR1000K6 and Sarah Jordan’s heavily reworked SV700, an SV650 with a big bore kit, lightweight Dymag wheels and a GSXR600K4 front end. With no previous experience of a 1000cc machine Matt impressed everyone by being almost as quick as Steve on a circuit neither had seen before and only a couple of seconds off the pace of the British SuperStock Cup champion!
We are waiting to hear back about the next step with a major sponsor although it looks like their plans may be to build a working relationship in 2007 whilst we help them with some development ready for a much larger effort for the 2008 season. In the mean time we hope to hear soon how much support we can get from Suzuki and, more importantly, whether we will get the new GSXR1000K7 before they are released to the general public so that we can get some testing done before heading off to Valencia for the first round.