Round four of the Superbike World Championship got underway today at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Spain.
After making a positive debut two weeks ago at Assen, the Yamaha Motoxracing WorldSBK Team now takes on its second race weekend with British rider Bradley Ray. Sandro Carusi’s team completed a two-day test at this track in late March, but track conditions were very different today with decidedly higher temperatures.
In the first free practice, Ray set a fastest time of 1’43”719 but was unable to improve on this in the afternoon’s session (1’44”363) due to the heat. The Brit rounded out day one in twentieth place in the combined standings.
Tomorrow Bradley will take part in the third and final practice session, followed by Superpole and the first race of this fourth round.
“During these first sessions, we focused on tyre choice because we know that the asphalt at this track is particularly abrasive. We’ll continue to work in this direction again tomorrow”.
“Today went well. We worked a lot on the race simulation to try to understand how the tyres might drop during the race. We made a big change to the bike for the race simulation but now we need to sit down and make a plan for tomorrow’s race, as I feel like we need to get the bike closer to the window and close the gap to the frontrunners. We didn’t put a new tyre in for the time attack, so I’m not worried about my position. I’m quite pleased with my race pace and consistency, though there are a few things we can improve for tomorrow’s long race. Not a bad Friday anyway, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s qualifying and the first race of the weekend”.
