Tom Sykes peeled off BMW’s best WorldSBK result for some time when he bagged fifth in Aragon’s second big race, showing just how good the M1000RR could be.

But there is one clear area for improvement for Sykes to match the best of the other bikes, the rear end.

“I don’t want to give away too much, but for me it is really quite simple,” Sykes told bikesportews.com. “It’s that still for me on this bike I would like to accept a little bit more rear performance. Not going into too much detail, or it’s wet and everything, but it’s clear to see that even in the dry race I’m not able to take the maximum from the brand-new race tyre.

“When you go for example into an extreme environment with a qualifying tyre, that covers a lot of our issues and it puts us very close to the competition. Like I said, this weekend has been very valuable. We’ve learned a lot. Also in the wet condition, again different approaches. I was just feeling my way and I wanted to understand some things. Michael took more confidence in his package and he was on the money, so we’ve seen myself on the podium in the last couple years with the wet.

“Michael was strong in the wet. We were strong on the intermediates and we were strong on the Q tyres. So my focus is the slick in the dry. We’re just not able to extract the first five laps like our competition, but this is something which now we understand very well and we’re going to work on.”