PBM Kawasaki’s Shane Byrne will start the opening MCE British Superbike race from the second row, after the reigning champ couldn’t match the pace of the front-rowers during the qualifying session at Assen.
Byrne was nearly two seconds off the time set by pole-setter, Milwaukee Yamaha’s Josh Brookes, and while the Australian and fellow Showdown riders, Ellison and Laverty reached the 1’36’s Byrne couldn’t and as the clock counted down he ended the afternoon with a 1’37.005 rotation.
But for Byrne he is not feeling too down-hearted as his team have planned something big for tomorrow, and his pace is not a ‘massive trauma’ just yet. Only two points separate him from current leader, Brookes and for Byrne starting from the second row puts him in the mix for a good result on Sunday.
“It’s been a little bit difficult so far this weekend, because obviously this circuit is so different from the UK tracks. Some of the stuff we thought we’d learned at Oulton Park we brought here and it just doesn’t seem to be working for us. It’s not helping that pretty much every session we get is wet to start with and then you get ten minutes of banzai riding over damp patches at the end of it,” said Byrne.
“We’ve got a bit more work to do; we tried some stuff through qualifying and while it’s easy to sit here and say we’ve got more pace that we haven’t shown yet, I think it’s not quite the massive trauma that it looks like at the minute. That said, we’re going to try something pretty big for tomorrow. We’re ok in the first sector, there or thereabouts in the last sector; it’s just the middle bit - all those long, hanging corners are really hurting us. I sit there almost getting frustrated riding around them, because I know what I need to do but at the minute I can’t do it.
“We’ll keep chipping away in warm-up, get a good start in the race, and set the homing beacon off. I sacrificed some of qualifying to get a better set-up for the race. It wasn’t the intention - not how it was meant to pan out - and while a front row start would have been the ideal scenario, the second row is absolutely fine. It puts us in the mix. There’s a few guys who will be able to do one or two fast laps at the start, but these races are eighteen laps, and I’m not too despondent.”
