Works Yamaha's Eugene Laverty was suffering with actute rear wheelspin during the opening World Superbike practice sessions at Magny-Cours today but the likeable Irishman managed to set the second fastest time of teh day after finding part of a way around it.
Laverty jumped into second place on the qualifying sheet with his last lap this afternoon and was only 0.012s behind provisional pole man Carlos Checa after applying ideas to fix the spin but he says he has another step to take in that direction.
"It was a really good first qualifying session, finishing second in the time sheets is the highest I have been all year. The closest I have been to this at such an early stage in the weekend was at Monza when we were third, so hopefully that is a good omen," said the Toomebridge man.
"We did two long runs to get a lot of work done on race distance. We are struggling a little with rear grip, having a lot of spinning but we made a step mid-way and again at the end which gave us a clear direction of what we need to do, so hopefully we can continue working towards making further improvements tomorrow."
