PJ Jacobsen finished the opening day of action for the Spanish Round of the FIM Supersport World Championship in ninth place and, therefore, he has been seeded directly to tomorrow’s Superpole 2, which will get underway at 11:55 local time (GMT+2) at the ‘Circuito de Jerez’. The Honda WorldSSP rider set a personal fastest lap-time of 1’45.239, which was only 0.325s slower than third-placed rider Niki Tuuli and just 0.090s away from fifth position in what was a very close session.
After finishing free practice 1 in third place, the young American rider could not further improve his speed as track conditions changed considerably during the afternoon session. Jacobsen and the team will have another opportunity to try some more changes to the set-up of the Honda CBR600RR during tomorrow morning’s 15-minute FP3, in order to be ready to battle for a spot on the front row of the grid for the penultimate race of the season.
Patrick Jacobsen 2
9th/1’45.239
Being in Superpole 2 is surely good news, although today didn’t go exactly as planned. We’re a little bit behind now, but we have tested here in the past so we have lapped enough around this circuit to know that we can do better than what we did today. We need to bounce back and make a good step forwards for tomorrow, but I’m confident we will be able to do so.
Pieter Breddels
Technical Manager
Today we were unable to replicate the times set during winter testing – nobody did, really. The fact is that track conditions are so different that the set-up we found back then doesn’t really work now. The day started quite well for us but, after taking third place in FP1, we couldn’t really improve any more. We need to take a look at the data and come up with some changes ahead of tomorrow’s Superpole 2, because apart from the first two, the other top 10 riders are all locked together.
