The Italian Speed Championship officially started over the weekend at the Misano World Circuit. The dancing reopened with the now proven formula of the double race, one on Saturday and one on Sunday.
Representing a novelty in this over one hundred year old championship is the debut of the new Supersport 600, made up of a single grid but with separate classifications: on one side all the teams that have fielded Civ configuration bikes, on the other world configuration bikes with larger engines. models and increasingly larger displacements, which will make up the Next generation ranking.
The first round of the Civ begins on Thursday under torrential rain which allows the drivers to use only two of the scheduled rounds. Data acquisition work begins immediately to develop weekend strategies.
On Friday the event gets to the heart of the event and thanks to the respite from the bad weather the team manages to find the right setting for the two Yamaha r6s which will face the first qualifying of the year in the afternoon.
For the rookie Andrea Baiamonte the qualifying round represents the first real debut in the 600 category and as such is used to get to know the bike better and try to do the kilometers necessary to create the right feeling with the R6, while Mattia Casadei due to the The start of the rain ended his qualifying in P 13, after only a few laps of the track.
Saturday’s Q2, characterized by uncertain weather between dry and wet, did not help the drivers to improve, with Mattia confirming his thirteenth position on the grid and Andrea failing to qualify. Race 1 therefore leads Mattia to start his race in the middle of the starting grid, and to work to gain ground. The positions recovered are different and the race ends in seventh place in the Next Generation ranking.
On Sunday morning the team chose not to participate in the wet warm-up given the more favorable weather forecast for the afternoon race. The decision is legitimized by the fact that the changes thought up following the data collection of the previous race could only have been tested in dry conditions, it would therefore have been an unnecessary risk to take part in that test session.
The second race of the weekend starts in the afternoon, which sees Mattia advance one position on the grid and line up twelfth at the start. The latter is excellent and Casadei immediately enters the compact and close group of riders competing in the central positions of the ranking. On the sixth lap, however, a technical problem with the clutch slows down the driver’s race and he is forced to lose positions and finish the race trying to bring home as many points as possible.
We leave the Misano circuit after a long weekend which allowed us to work in different weather conditions and to acquire a vast amount of data to work on in order to conduct the next rounds in the best possible way.
