Pata Honda maks steady Superbike progress

Pata Honda riders Jonathan Rea and Leon Haslam were eighth and eleventh-fastest respectively after Friday’s two free practice sessions for Sunday’s seventh-round World Superbike championship races at Misano in Italy.

However, while not content with their overall positions on the Friday leaderboard, which was headed by local rider Davide Giugliano, both Pata Honda pilots are quietly satisfied with progress made in today’s two 45-minute sessions.

Rea is 0.6s off Giugliano’s time while Haslam is a further 0.3s away and both British riders are confident of further improvement in tomorrow’s two free practice sessions ahead of Superpole which will determine final grid positions for Sunday’s two 21-lap races at the 4.226km Misano circuit.

Jonathan Rea - P8After a couple of difficult rounds at Donington and Sepang, we turned up here with somedifferent engine brake strategies. To be honest, we got off to a slow start developing thatand getting some base settings into it this morning. Our position of eighth might not reflectit, but we’re actually making quite good progress. I’m starting to feel like I have a bike thatI can push again and I think we’ll make some good steps overnight. I’ve given some goodfeedback to the guys and I’m actually enjoying riding. It’s a shame we’re not closer to thesharp end, but we reduced the gap to the front quite a lot in the heat of that secondsession and we need to do the same in the morning. I’m satisfied with our work today butwe need to keep pushing.

Leon Haslam - P11This morning’s session wasn't ideal and we got a bit interrupted with two red flags in thisafternoon’s practice when we had a new tyre in the bike. But we found quite a majorelectronic issue that we couldn’t solve today but it should be quite easy to fix for tomorrow.I’m looking forward to that, even though we’ve still got some way to go. We’re 0.9s off thequickest time and although it’s quite tight we definitely need to make those steps.

Pieter Breddels - technical co-ordinator

We were quite a bit off with Jonathan’s settings this morning but we made some goodsteps this afternoon. We’re not there yet, but we’re improving and we have some goodplans for tomorrow. We’ve seen some good progress during the day with Leon, too, andhe’s not so far away from Jonathan. We’re speaking about some chassis changes fortomorrow and there are some electronics changes required, so we’ll see how those work tomorrow.

Free Practice Results

1 Davide Guigliano 1m36.370 ITA DUCATI Ducati Superbike Team2 Tom Sykes 1m36.497 GBR KAWASAKI Kawasaki Racing Team3 Marco Melandri 1m36.500 ITA APRILIA Aprilia Racing Team4 Chaz Davies 1m36.636 GBR DUCATI Ducati Superbike Team5 Loris Baz 1m36.661 FRA KAWASAKI Kawasaki Racing Team6 Alex Lowes 1m36.698 GBR SUZUKI Voltcom Crescent Suzuki7 Sylvain Guintoli 1m36.860 FRA APRILIA Aprilia Racing Team8 Jonathan Rea 1m37.024 GBR HONDA Pata Honda9 Eugene Laverty 1m37.149 IRL SUZUKI Voltcom Crescent Suzuki10 Toni Elias 1m37.234 ESP APRILIA Red Devils Roma11 Leon Haslam 1m37.352 GBR HONDA Pata Honda


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