Donington Park - Bennetts Bike Social MSV Track Day 13/8/25 Suzuki GSX-8R

The final Bennetts Track Day of the season and mine too! This last Bennetts track day seems to be becoming like an "end of term" party, with journalists from Visordown and Fast Bikes present, as well as riders like Dan Linfoot and of course, the legendary John McGuinness!

This is my sixth TD of the year, all at Donington because my plan this year was to stick to a track I knew well, so I could concentrate on becoming a better track day rider and have more fun!

For me, having more fun and leaving happier at the end of the day comes from getting the lines right around the circuit and trying to ride the track like it should be ridden. I am certainly making progress there... my fastest lap today was a 1:54.1, which is half a second faster then my best time one year ago on my BMW S1000XR - a bike with twice the power! A big shout out to a website called Serious Racing by the way https://serious-racing.com/home/ If you have decent GPS data from your track day, you can upload that data (mine comes from my GoPro videos) and you can compare your own laps and also compare yourself against your friends or others. Donington has some premium laps from Sylvain Guintoli and so I've bought those to help see where I can keep improving. I'll make a video on this website at some point!

There are still some big improvements I can make and you can see that from my body positioning for a start... but I am reaching the limits of what this 50+ year old rider can achieve on my road bikes. I think I'll spend a few more track days at Donington next year and once I'm satisfied that I'm stopped making obvious mistakes, become more confident and I've smoothed out my riding, I'll move on to another circuit and start the same journey there.

For this video I decided to bring all my camera angles together at the same time for fun! Sorry if it looks too busy for you, but I felt like doing something different with my footage and I quite like the result. I used the GPS built into my GoPro Hero 6 (an ancient artifact now in action camera terms!) to get my speed, lean angles, accel/decel and lap times via Telemetry Overlay. You can see that the speedo on the Suzuki is pretty optimistic!

You can also see that I have some ground clearance problems! I've already fitted adjustable footrest riser plates from TST Industries, but clearly I need to use one of the higher mounting points... Now the track day season is over for me, the riser plates are coming off because I don't need them for road riding.

The tyres are Metzeler M9RR's - this is their third track day and I did start to notice that the rear tyre was sliding a bit more when leant over and getting on the power. Once I got home I realised that I have worn the tread on the sides of the tyres down to the wear markers.. there still plenty of tread left in the centre and so I am very proud of this 😂 The front is fine but the rear is dead at 2600 miles - I'm guessing I could have done double that distance easily if I hadn't done three track days on it. I think these tyres are a great option for the Suzuki.

I did have a habit of short-shifting too early at times - I wasn't concentrating on the rev counter and was changing up a bit too soon. It did reveal that the bike was running out of puff in fifth gear going up hill through Starkey's Bridge and towards McLeans... I think that my planned airbox mods and ECU flash will take care of that nicely!

It's not the fastest bike at the track by a long shot, but when I'm passing S1000RR's, GSXR750's, R9's, CBR6's and R6's, it shows that it's not the size of the dog in the fight that matters... 😁