Wayne Maxwell reflects on QLD & looks to Wakefield Park

Wayne Maxwell & Adrian Monti
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Trevor Hedge: I’m here with the McMartin Racing Squad at Wakefield Park after what turned out to be a fairly productive day guys? (This interview was conducted during a test earlier this month)

Wayne: “Yeah it definitely was, we were thankful for the weather to hold off to give us some dry laps really, just before lunch and in the afternoon. I think we got four sessions which was pretty good. We worked through most of what we wanted to achieve for today and I think we got a bit of a plan. Obviously last year we had a pretty good bike here, so just trying to improve that in little areas I think. A little more consistency over the race.”

Trev: And did you find anything of marked difference today Adrian, that you want to continue development path towards race weekend?

Adrian Monti: “That’s what we spent a fair bit of today looking through, we were looking at the bike as we raced here last year and tried to see the things we learnt throughout the season last year, as to how they applied at this circuit. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t. We’ve got the data for all those sort of things, and we can try and explore those further. See what direction we can go in tomorrow.”

Trev: It really looked in Queensland Wayne, as though a lot of your mid corner speed had deserted you, that’s where it looked as though you were really deficient to some of the other guys, have you come to a realisation as to why that was?

Wayne: “Yeah I didn’t know it earlier, I had to find out just before here, that’s the development path. Obviously our bike was amazing at Phillip Island, and was amazing at Tailem Bend last year, it was good here last year, it was good in Darwin. So I’m sure we’ve got a rough idea now, a bit more data, the more tracks we go back to for the second time and try stuff that’s worked at other tracks. You know it’s not necessarily going to work for us here, so yeah, we’ll just keep going and we’ll just change it a little bit. It’s a small window on the V4 R and when you get it right, it obviously works really well, and when you don’t, well we’ve seen the result in Queensland.”

Adrian: “And further to that, we struggled in Queensland from Friday morning and I thought we’d change a few things in regards to how we approached Friday and that was my mistake, we went in the wrong direction, and we never really recovered.”

Trev: It was amazing to see how much you guys had the fork internals in and out of the bike during the sessions, let alone inbetween. It’s something I haven’t really seen you do on the run like that path before, so to see you chasing more geometry there than electronics set up, certainly stood out.

Adrian: “We just changed the approach to how we went to find a lap time. It was different to how we did it everywhere else over the last two years, but we won’t be doing that again.”

Trev: Obviously you guys have quite a sophisticated electronic set-up compared to most of the others, how much time have you been spending on that today, on engine brake control, or mapping or anything else? Anything you can share with us, to shed any light, or are you going to play those cards close to your chest?

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Adrian: “Of course we definitely use logging, and electronics do play a big part in our bike, but I challenge the assertion that it’s more advanced, I think the MoTeC ECU that ASBK has on offer, has many more parameters than what we have to change. We have one traction control parameter, they have about twelve. So is it more advanced, no, does it work well? Yes.”

Trev: You can use sector based tuning on your bike I believe, but on the MoTeC firemware allowed by ASBK they have locked that functionality out.

Adrian: “There’s multiple ways everyone can tune their ECU in different directions, but the MoTeC in the right hands is a very capable ECU.”

Trev: Even with the ASBK firmware locking out sector by sector?

Adrian: “Even with the way it is now.”

Trev: Are you using sector by sector a lot here today?

Adrian: “Nah.”

Trev: Just the same engine brake the whole lap, etc? Was that the same as Phillip Island and Queensland?

Adrian: “Yeah we tried it a bit last year but we’ve just been sticking to bare bones and basic, just to try and keep things simple.”

Trev: I mean obviously it’s a probably endless rabbit hole you can disappear into if you really want to spend endless amount of time and laps at the circuit to try and fine tune it, if you did want to use the sector based mapping. But I guess we just don’t really have that amount of time…?

Adrian: “This is the thing, we’ve got limited testing, limited track time, and we want to try and make every session count. And as I said we tried to do things sa bit differently in queensland, it didn’t work, so we’ve gone back to how we did it last year.”

Trev: You’re confident you’re back to where you were?

A: “Yeah.”

Trev: We’ll see you back here on race weekend, to see the results from what you’ve learnt from today…

The third round of the 2022 Mi-Bike Motorcycle Insurance Australian Superbike Championship roars to life on the weekend of April 23-24 at Wakefield Park, Goulburn, NSW.

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