After putting together an almost completely new team in WorldSBK, despite it being an official Honda Motor effort with HRC backing, the Moriwaki Althea Honda team had a frank intro to the first day of collective testing at Phillip Island.

Leon Camier led the line for Honda at PI but in the early days of the project he finished up 11th fastest of 19 riders, and 1.716 seconds down on the clear fastest man overall, Alvaro Bautista.

The tall Englishman said, “There are quite a few areas we need to improve on, for sure, and we have known this from testing before – where we need to improve the bike. We do not have so many options of things to try, with geometries and things like this, so I am not sure how we are going to make some progress. I know we can make some progress, for sure, but to make a big step, it is maybe not so easy to do.”

Camier worked with his electronics package, and found some positives. “With the electronics we made some good progress. Obviously we have no information for this track, at all, so there is a lot of information we need to make the electronic settings good, and make everything work right. So now we just need to go over the data a lot and try to refine the package we have. But there is a lot of room for progress for sure.”

Camier was asked how his 2019 bike compared to his 2018 version, and he said there are different. “Compared to last year’s bike there are some strong points and some weak points, but last year we were quite strong here. So there are a few areas I know where we can improve here but I do not know if it is possible now. It is difficult to say, to be honest. This make take some time to change but considering this is new for the team, new bike, first time in this circuit with this bike, there are a lot of things to improve, for sure.” 

By Gordon Ritchie