The Hopper Report

nhfirefighter13 · 03-31-2006, 8:25 AM

From his MySpace page:

Quote:

3/28/2006 - I’m just in Barcelona airport on my way back to the UK from Jerez and I’m still feeling pretty disappointed about Sunday. We’d struggled to find a set-up for the bike in the tests at Jerez and during practice for the Grand Prix but we made some drastic changes in the warm-up and everything clicked into place. I lapped fourth fastest and felt good for the race. Basically I got a good jump off the line and must have been about seventh into turn one, but then Elias came piling up the inside and I got caught up in that. I almost hit Rossi and had to slow to almost a standstill so by the time I got going again I was way back behind Hofmann and Cardoso. After that I just stormed through the pack. I made some pretty rough passes actually but I knew that with the package we had I needed to get as far up the field as I could as early as possible. Once I got behind Nakano and Stoner I started to get really bad arm pump in my right arm. It’s weird because I’ve never had arm pump on a MotoGP bike before but I reckon it’s because I was riding so tense over those first six or seven laps. In the end I just had to finish where I could and Kenny came past me, which was a shame. We know we could have done much better but at the end of the day I could have ended up with nothing in that first corner and we came away with some decent points.
Over the next week I’m just planning to get as much swimming and cycling in as I can, although it will be tough because the weather in England is freezing right now. We’ll be heading out to Qatar a day early because the race is on Saturday and I’m pretty optimistic about going there. The tests went ok there in February although the Bridgestone tyres were at a bit of a disadvantage, but we found some things in the test at Jerez on Monday that I think will work really well. Hopefully we have a bit of luck to go with the hard work being put in by myself, Suzuki and Bridgestone and we will have a good result to shout about!!! Speak to you from Qatar… Hopper 21.

Think he'll actually do something this year?