The fifth round of the Superbike World Championship at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino
Ferrari circuit in Imola got off to a positive start for both riders of the
Aruba.it Racing – Ducati team.
Right from this morning’s first free
practice session, Davies showed he had a good feeling with the Imola circuit,
where the Welsh rider has already won four times and today he was able to set
second quickest time behind the Kawasaki of Rea. In the afternoon session, Chaz
then knocked another four tenths of a second off his time to remain in second
place in the provisional timesheets behind his northern Irish rival.
It
was a good first outing on the Imola track for his team-mate Álvaro Bautista,
championship leader with 11 wins out of 11. Third in FP1, the Spanish rider
shaved a further two-tenths off his best time in the afternoon to end the day in
fourth place.
Tomorrow the third and final free practice session will be
held at 09:00 CET, followed two hours later at 11:00 by Superpole qualifying for
the starting-grid line-up for Race 1, which gets underway at
14:00.
Chaz Davies (Aruba.it Racing – Ducati #7) – 2nd (1’46.529)
“It’s been a while since I’ve ended Friday in the top 3 so that was pretty
good and we made a big step forward. Honestly the momentum has been going the
right way in the last couple of races and Imola is a good time to try and turn
over the page a bit. Having said that, I’m not 100% happy with the feeling with
my Panigale V4 R so I hope I can turn things around for tomorrow because I feel
I’ve got some good margin to improve the lap time. If we can make the right
changes, I don’t see why we can’t fight for the win tomorrow.”
Álvaro
Bautista (Aruba.it Racing – Ducati #19) – 4th (1’47.086)
“Today was a
positive day because it’s the first time I have ever raced at Imola. Right away
I found a good feeling with the track, while unlike the other races, I still
have to improve the feeling with my bike, especially in corner turn-in, but in
the afternoon we made some changes and the feeling was better. Today we always
worked in view of the race and we did more than the total laps with quite a good
pace. Probably we still have to improve the stability of the bike because on
this track the bike is almost always leaning and you don’t have any breathing
space.”
