During our articles in the Moto3 races of the Junior World Championship, this weekend in Barcelona, we were surprised, first of all by the presence of John Mc Phee, then by his very modest results in the race.
The light came thanks to a press release from the Peugeot Motocycles Saxoprint team; the 21-year-old Scottish driver was testing Mahindra's new gearbox for the very first time, something that has until now been characterized by a certain lack, or lack of reliability.
From then on, everything becomes clear; logging kilometers was the main objective, taking risks by attempting a performance, much less.
We will still note that the pole was achieved in 1'54.143 in CEV, a time which would have placed Alonso Lopez 5th a tenth behind poleman Brad Binder in GP (1'54.024), while John Mc Phee, qualified in 1 '55.720 in GP, did 1'55.014 in CEV, or 7 tenths better, despite more difficult conditions due to wind and very high temperatures.
The objective now is to homologate this new box in order to make it available to all teams from the Austrian Grand Prix on August 14.
#17 John McPHEE – 11th/9th: “The last four days have been very positive for us. We came here with the main objective of testing new parts, and in particular to align the kilometers with the new gearbox. Overall, I'm really happy with this new box because it works well, or more accurately, it worked flawlessly all weekend, which is of course the most important thing. In terms of timing, it doesn't make a big difference, but it is much better in terms of consistency because it now allows you to drive regularly without making driving errors due to gearbox problems.
Besides that, we intensively used the time on track to test parts, which is not possible during a Grand Prix weekend. In doing this, we sometimes took a step forward, and sometimes also a step back, but the most important thing was to understand what the changes were doing to the bike.
Ultimately, our initial plan was not to race but on Sunday morning we thought it would be beneficial to also try the box in race conditions, although that would mean more track time for me. This was our main objective since we benefit from doing as many kilometers as possible. Overall we were 7 tenths faster than the Grand Prix weekend, so I think it was a positive test and we improved overall. »
