Goldbet BMW's Chaz Davies says he lost a lot of time in the two World Superbike qualifying sessions at Laguna Seca, going the wrong way with setup in the first and then having to pit-in with a dash problem during the second which cost him 20 minutes.

The Welshman used his track knowledge to top free practice one but then the problems began. He still fought his way back to fifth place on the provisional grid ahed of Superpole and race one, which are being held on the same day.

“The day started very well obviously with P1 this morning but I expected the other guys would catch up pretty quickly. We did not have a good session this afternoon in the first qualifying practice. We went the wrong way with the set-up, seeing that the bike was very sensitive to changes," said Davies.

"Then in the second qualifying practice, the bike was pretty good. We had definitely improved it; I was quite consistent and felt comfortable in the end. We still need to find a couple of tenths. Today’s schedule was pretty tight, there was not much time between the sessions so there was no way to do adaptions to the gearbox and things like that.

"We will do this tonight and hopefully will find some benefit there. In addition, we lost around 20 minutes in the last session of the day. That was a shame as I had stuff to try but despite that we are heading in the right direction with the bike. So we will try to further improve tomorrow and then to be ready for race one, which is pretty unusual to have it on a Saturday.”