£4 part (almost) stops play

When I dropped off my trashed 848 to George White, along with a box of parts, I didn't realise how much work would be involved in preparing the bike for the 848 Challenge. If I did, I probably wouldn't have had the front to show up, point to a date on the calendar two weeks ahead, make everyone a cup of tea and then clear off.

Truth be told, it's taken a huge effort to get the bike to a place where it's got everything it needs to go racing and I wouldn't be heading to Assen without the effort of Paul Sands (Sandzee) and Mike Collis at George White who worked all sorts of hours to get it sorted.

We had a couple of teething problems along the way but the biggest one was when we couldn't get the 848 to fire up through the ignition. Sandzee chased wires all around the bike and we all scratched our heads at the Ducati wiring diagram. We could get it to fire up if we bypassed the ECU but fat lot of good that would have been. We wasted half a Saturday trying to sort it. So frustrating. It felt pointless carrying on preparing the bike until we'd got it running reliably.

We were bailed out by Rick Hackett at JHP Ducati who told us it was most probably a £4 part that had failed. We found it, whipped it out and sure enough it was the cause of our problem. Can't tell you how happy we were to have fixed it.

With hours to go before departure, I turned up to George White clutching the 848 rules and regulations and sprung a few final changes on Sandzee, including changing the brake line setup, wiring in a kill switch and lock-wiring a handful of bolts we hadn't yet done.

Ready just in the nick of time? Just..

Time for a quick picture of the bike with the George White boys, no time for stickers and then it was just a case of catching the ferry from Dover.

Nothing like cutting it fine..

By Ben Cope