Genuine Broaster Chicken Honda team owner Danny Walker was been getting positive vibes last week in Elkhart Lake.
The ‘Sconsin fans are generally considered the most knowledgeable on the tour and many of them remember Honda’s glory days (not to mention the partying a good portion of them did with Fred Merkel back in the day).
Walker talked about the encouragement he got in the first day of practice at Road America.
“The awesome part is even Friday during the session, any time anybody saw Honda they were saying, ‘Man, so glad you guys are back!’ They were just pumped to see Honda back in the series.”
Look for a jump for Walker’s Honda after the Laguna round in July, when they will have additional communications with HRC during the World Superbike/MotoAmerica weekend.
“Marco Chini (Honda’s WorldSBK Operations Manager) has been really good about communicating with us,” Walker continued. “They gave us one of their swing arms with the link arm and one of their shocks, and gave us a really good baseline setting to get set up with that. So, we were able to develop our Penske and now we’re running the Penske on it. We knew what it did. We were able to run it on the dyno and say, we can build that. We’ve got one. So, we were able to start there which was great.
“They’ve offered to have Scotty (Jensen, Gagne’s crew chief) come over a couple times and get some stuff from them, but they’re struggling also. They got their bikes a little bit before we got ours. Not much, but a little bit before. So they’re way behind, and now obviously with the Nicky tragedy I’m pretty sure they’re pretty tied up and devastated, like all of us. So, we’ll see. We hope to see them at Laguna and see where they’ve gotten to and if there’s anything that we can take from that. But they’ve been really, really good actually. Again, they’re over there running that championship, so we can send them an email and it might take a couple days to get a response, but they’ve been pretty decent so far.”
