CHALLENGING FIRST DAY OF ACTION FOR THE HONDA WORLDSBK TEAM IN UK
The opening day of action for the seventh round of the 2016 FIM Superbike World Championship has drawn to a close at Donington Park, with Honda WorldSBK duo Michael van der Mark and Nicky Hayden fifteenth and eleventh, respectively, in the combined times of today’s two free practice sessions. Therefore, both riders will enter tomorrow’s first session of Superpole, with the goal to make it through and join today’s top-10 riders into the final fifteen minutes of qualifying.
Van der Mark had a difficult time in getting up to speed today, although he was able to lap one second quicker during FP2 compared to the morning session. The young Dutchman will continue to work hard with his crew in order to improve his feeling with the Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP around the iconic Donington Park circuit.
Michael van der Mark (15th / 1’29.359): “Today has been a difficult day and I’m surely not happy with how things went. The main problem this morning was braking, while this afternoon things started to get better. I did a long run that turned out to be quite encouraging and when I came back, we worked on some further changes. Unfortunately, we were a little bit on the limit with the suspension settings and we couldn’t improve our lap time in the end. To be honest, though, I think we’re in a better situation than our position today would suggest. I’m sure that, with some changes to the set-up, we can still go for a good qualifying result and be ready for the race.”