Christian Iddon “caught off-guard” by Kawasaki inconsistency at opening 2025 BSB tests

Christian Iddon’s Donington BSB test was “more difficult than I expected” having found a drastically different feeling on the Kawasaki ZX-10RR at the Midlands track compared to the Navarra test.

Iddon, who moved to FS-3 Kawasaki over the winter, was in the top-10 by the end of the test at Donington, but that came after a difficult start for the #21.

“[It was] more difficult than I expected,” Iddon told Crash.net at the Donington test, “because I had a really good feeling with the bike in Spain.

“We didn’t really have a reference for lap times in Spain, but I felt really good with the bike, and the bike’s identical to how it was in Spain and we came here and I really struggled with it; so that was an interesting one, I didn’t anticipate that at all.”

He added: “It really caught me off-guard, to be honest, how different it felt [at Donington compared to Navarra].

“Of course bikes feel different track-to-track – different [surfaces], different amounts of grip, different layouts – but it was really night-and-day.”

The new arrival to FS-3 Kawasaki at least felt he was able to make progress towards the end of the Donington test, although inconsistent weather frustrated his hopes of a final time attack in the last session.

“By the end of the test we made really good progress; I’m a little bit disappointed that we didn’t get the last run to make the last step in lap time.

“I’d have been quite content if we’d have got a 1:27 of any description – it would’ve been nice to break that barrier, but we didn’t. It’s one of them.

“I’m content with how much progress we’ve made, the team’s worked really well, obviously the conditions haven’t been ideal for anyone – it’s been frustrating really: not enough water to make it wet, but too much water [for it to be] dry.

“There’s definitely some peculiarities with the bike but that’s the same with every bike, but I’m just trying to figure out how to adapt, as well, a little bit.

“It’s trying to understand how much is the limit of the bike and how much is the limit of me and the way I ride, and then how I can adapt. Then, once I’ve finished the adaptation process as well as I can, [it’s about] how good [we can] make it.

“I still feel like I’m learning the Kawasaki, I’ve not done [too many] laps on it, but so far so good. I’m a little bit disappointed to not be further up, but all in all it’s been a positive test.”

Looking ahead to the final preseason test at Oulton Park, Iddon was hoping to find some consistency between his feeling on the bike there and that he had by the end of the two days at Donington.

“If we can go to Oulton [and] we start again it’ll be a little bit of an eye-opener, so I hope that doesn’t happen,” he said.

“But [by then] we will have done three completely different types of track so we would’ve covered all bases anyway, so if we get a good setup for all those three different ones [then] at some point that will come to roost during the season.

“So, I’m really hoping to roll the bike out of the garage at Oulton and it’ll work, but I’m not daft, I know that doesn’t always happen – there’s always some fine tuning to do.”

Iddon added that part of the work at Donington had been re-aligning with “the Kawasaki way of working” having strayed from it at Navarra.

“We kind of went away a little bit from the Kawasaki way of working, and we’ve moved back towards it here, which shows that I need to understand the bike more,” he said.

“I tried not to change anything in Spain and we hardly did anything, but now we’ve basically reverted back [from] what I’d got them to do.

“It shows that I’m starting to understand the bike. It’s a very well-developed bike, they know where it works, they know the window it works in.

“I need a little bit of assistance to get myself comfortable, so we had to change it in Spain, and now I think to move to the next level we’re having to change it back to what a Kawasaki works like.”