The opening day of action for the Spanish Round of the 2016 FIM Superbike World Championship has been a positive one for the Honda WorldSBK Team. In the combined times of today’s two free practice sessions at Jerez, Michael van der Mark and Nicky Hayden fourth and seventh, respectively. Therefore, both riders have successfully qualified for tomorrow’s Superpole 2, scheduled at 10:55 local time (GMT+2).
Despite the overnight rain, good weather conditions and mild temperatures helped the World Superbike riders to make the most of the two hours of track action available to them. Hayden and van der Mark got up to speed straight away on board their Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP machines and were second and sixth at the end of FP1.
As free practice 2 got underway, van der Mark made good use of a new set of Pirelli tyres and, on his first flying lap, he set his fastest time of the day in 1’41.859. The 23-year-old Dutchman kept himself in third place for the majority of the session, before being demoted to fourth by Lowes moments before the chequered flag was deployed. Between the two sessions, Hayden only managed to improve his best lap-time by 0.121s, but that was enough to earn a solid seventh place finish. The American rider also worked on long runs, which helped himself and his crew gather some valuable information for the rest of the weekend.
Michael van der Mark 60
4th/1’41.859
I’m quite happy with how today went. We had a decent start in the first session and we were able to improve our lap-time. We made some changes for FP2 and, as soon as I went out on track, I was immediately a lot faster. We wanted to improve some more but unfortunately we were unable to find that last tenth of a second that would have moved us further up in the timesheets. The grip seems to get worse after a couple of laps and that’s definitely something we have to work on. We’re not too far off, but we need to work on that last bit of speed we need.
Nicky Hayden 69
7th/1’41.994
It has been a quite normal day at the office, really. We have a fairly good base set-up for this track from our last test here in January. The conditions seem to be quite different, but we know this track can change quite a lot at different times of the year. This morning was not too bad, while this afternoon I’d have hoped to improve a bit more, especially because here at Jerez every tenth of a second is crucial. I was seventh at the end of FP2, although still only 0.2s from the top. We did some long-run laps on the tyres today to get some good data and we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.
Pieter Breddels
Technical Manager
The overnight rain made the track quite slippery, but we definitely cannot complain about the weather today. We put together the set-up found during winter testing and the general settings found throughout the season and it all came out nicely for both riders, who were both able to get up to speed straight away. With fresh tyres, Michael was able to improve quite a lot and that gave us some time to further experiment with the settings. In the end, he has a really strong race pace, but it looks like times are generally very close towards the top positions. With Nicky we tried different tyre choices and in the end he went out for a quick lap but the track had slowed down compared to the start of the session, and it was clear by the fact that only few riders were able to improve their lap-times in the final stages. Overall, we’re quite happy with our performance and things are looking good for tomorrow
