Even though Michael Laverty blitzed the opening day of British Sueprbike free practice at Snetterton today, setting the fastest time by three-tenths of a second from reigning champion Tommy Hill, he believes he will run out of grip at half-race distance unless a solution is found at the Norfolk track tomorrow.

Laverty set a 1'49.340 on his 18th lap of 19 in the second session on a new tyre but the Irishman cannot find a setup that allows him to keep grip on Pirelli's SC1 tyre until anything like the end of a race. The Samsung Honda man isn't alone, however, as other Honda team are also finding it hard to find a race-distance setup.

"We can set a fast lap as we showed today but even after spending two days testing at Cadwell, we are still struggling to find a setup that lets me set fast laps to anything like a race distance," said Laverty, speaking to bikesportnews.com.

"The grip just disappears after eight laps on the SC1. We can't use the SC2 like Jonathan Rea does and wait for grip to come in because our races aren't long enough so we are pretty stuck for a solution at the moment.

"Last year's SC1 would last a decent length of time and we might have to get together with the other Honda teams and ask Pirelli to bring back the spec from last year otherwise we are going to struggle all year."