WSB: Camier quick despite lack of electronics switch

Leon Camier impressed in his third test with the Red Bull Honda team to place second quickest behind World Champion Jonathan Rea at Portimao.

While his quickest time was set on qualifying rubber, Camier showed strong at both Portimao and Jerez last week despite the Red Bull Honda team having not made their planned switch from Cosworth to Magnetti Marelli electronics.

Camier’s pace across winter testing shows the Honda squad to be in a much improved position with the CBR1000RR Fireblade ahead of the 2018 season, but the Brit says there are still areas to work on and wants to switch to the new electronics system as soon as possible.

The Ten Kate squad was supposed to have the Magnetti Marelli kit in place for the Portimao test, but a delay in parts would mean this wasn’t possible with attention now turning to trying the new kit at the official Philip Island test.

“It was a good test all in all, we made a lot of progress and smoothing things out as we go,” Camier said after Portimao. “We did some slightly longer runs as well to understand how the bike’s going to work towards the middle and end of the race, I was pretty comfortable with that. We still have some areas we’d like to work on to improve our race pace and lap time on the race tyre but it’s all progressing. We had a good feeling on the qualifying tyre as well so, as I said, all in all pretty happy and looking forward to getting to the first race and getting started.”