Pata Honda’s Leon Haslam is hoping that the weather in Turkey remains dry, especially for the World Superbike warm up session tomorrow morning. The Brit feels that he can show his full potential if the weather allows him to have some much needed track time before the main races.

Haslam starts from the third row of the grid after setting the ninth-fastest time in this afternoon’s Superpole at Istanbul Park. The 30-year-old was unable to make the improvements he sought after yesterday’s qualifying after rain washed out much of this morning’s qualifying and practice sessions. The Smalley resident felt he could have made it on to the second row, and is now confident with the changes made to the race tyre after Superpole one.

“It didn’t help sitting in the garage today until Superpole, but that’s the way it goes with the weather sometimes. We tried a few things in Superpole one, which weren’t amazing at the start but we made a good change on the race tyre. I was able to drop into the 56s on race rubber, which I was very happy with. We had a few of the old gremlins when we used the qualifiers and only went 0.3 or 0.4 seconds faster,” said Haslam.

“But there’s so much more potential to go a lot faster with some more track time. I felt we could at least get on the second row here, but we’ll have to do a bit more work tomorrow. Warm-up will be important for more track time. Hopefully it’ll be dry and we can go in the right direction.”