Team Alstare Suzuki’s Michel Fabrizio ended the opening day of practice and qualifying at the eighth round of the World Superbike Championship at Brno in the Czech Republic with the eighth quickest time of the day, but feels that he could have gone faster…
Despite a braking problem, only eight-tenths-of-a-second separate the Italian from provisional Pole-Setter Carlos Checa (Ducati), so he’s not too unhappy with today’s performance. Checa’s lap of 1:59.322 was a 10th of a second inside the lap record and just two-10ths ahead of local favourite Jakub Smrz (Ducati). Third quickest today was Marco Melandri with his Yamaha team-mate Eugene Laverty fourth.
Michel Fabrizio – 8th, 2:00.196:
“I am a bit disappointed to finish eighth today because I know it could’ve been better. The rear end of the bike was moving around a bit on the brakes and that stopped me from going quicker. Without this problem, I’m sure I would have been in the top four.
“I was fastest for quite some time in this morning’s session and was looking forward to improving quite a bit this afternoon. But now we’ll have to look at all the data and make some plans what to do about the problem tomorrow morning. As long as the problem can be solved, I think I’ll be able to challenge for a place on the front two rows of the grid. That’s something that hasn’t happened for me yet this season and tomorrow would be a good time to change that. I hope that we can manage our tyres well in Superpole and be in a good grid position n Sunday.”
Friday Qualifying: 1 Carlos Checa (ESP-Ducati) 1:59.322, 2 Jakub Smrz (CZE-Ducati) 1:59.585, 3 Marco Melandri (ITA-Yamaha) 1:59.653, 4 Eugene Laverty (GBR-Yamaha) 1:59.653, 5 Max Biaggi (ITA-Aprilia) 1:59.906, 6 Tom Sykes (GBR-Kawasaki) 2:00154. 8 Michel Fabrizio (ITA-Alstare Suzuki) 2:00.196
