Updated bike for Crutchlow in Austin

Cal Crutchlow will have an updated bike for this weekend with a new chassis and seat for his LCR Honda.

The Englishman is on “give or take” the same package as the Repsol Honda riders, having received the update with the main advantage being that it should offer him a more consistent bike to ride.

“It’s more consistency in corner entry, which is what we have been struggling with,” said Crutchlow. “It’s not going to be a head and shoulders thing, it’s more consistency over race distance. We can see clearly that they can do some things different to use, and we know why. But it’s a waiting game, to give them the information they already knew. So I wasn’t telling them any different, because Dani and Marc had already tested the bike that I’m on now, which was there Brno test bike and Valencia test bike, and they also immediately got rid of it at the end of the test in Sepang. But obviously, we had nothing to go onto. We got told quite early that we would get the bike, because of your speed, because of the information going back to Honda, because we’re nearly there. But we know the reason we’re not there fully, and I believe this will bring us closer to the front.”

Having worked with three different manufacturers over the last three years Crutchlow is ideally placed to be able to talk about how Honda and Yamaha take different approaches to their satellite entries.

“It seems a little different to how other manufacturers work. Obviously Yamaha, they all start the same, where here it seems that if the factory team gets an update, then we get what they had before. But this wasn’t because Dani’s not riding, that’s definite; it was already planned a long time before then.

“Obviously, I’m thankful to Honda to put their faith in me to be able to challenge, they can see something from the data that they analyzed, that we have a lot of meetings about, they say to me, don’t worry about that. So I’m like, why don’t I worry about that, they say you don’t need to worry about that. Then you sort of know already that they know.”