PJ Jacobsen and the Honda WorldSSP Team have concluded the opening day of action for the French Round of the FIM Supersport World Championship in eleventh place, meaning that the young American rider will have to go through Superpole 1 tomorrow in order to battle for a spot on the first four rows of the grid.
Jacobsen started free practice 1 at Magny-Cours with good pace and, after running as high as third, he was demoted to seventh place as he could not put together a quick lap towards the end of the session. The 23-year-old from Montgomery, New York, worked hard with his crew in order to find a good direction of setup for his Honda CBR600RR Fireblade machine but, as FP2 progressed, he did not manage to step up his game and found himself outside the top 10 by only 0.138s.
Superpole 1 will get underway tomorrow at 11:30 local time (GMT +2).
Patrick Jacobsen 2
11th / 1’42.508
To be honest, I don’t really know what went wrong today. For the past couple of races, after a good start on Friday morning we found ourselves unable to improve in the afternoon session. We need to figure out what’s going on, because this definitely puts us on the back foot for Superpole and the race. This is my worst first-day result of the season, on a track where last year I got pole position and won the race, so there is clearly some work to do. Hopefully we can improve on what’s been a bad day and turn things around tomorrow.
Pieter Breddels
Technical Manager
After Lausitzring, where we didn’t do too badly on race day, we made some changes to the suspensions setup and the clutch settings because in Germany the bike was too keen on going sideways on corner entry. We clearly solved this problem but, unfortunately, today we were unable to put a good lap-time together. We will work on the data to see what to do and maybe try to come up with a setup that can be a sort of compromise between the one we used in Germany and the one we utilised today. Still, nothing is lost so as long as we improve tomorrow morning, we can still hope for a good result in Superpole.
