Ducati’s Chaz Davies failed to get into the top five fastest times during the World Superbike free practice sessions at Magny-Cours today, and struggled once again with corner entry. But the Welshman did find some of the work that his team did in the recent tests at Mugello quite beneficial, and hopes to improve on his best time of a 1’38.747 in qualifying.

Davies did improve from the opening free practice session by nearly a second and jumped up from eleventh to eighth on the timing screens by the end of FP2. With some of the changes made to his Panigale it did feel slightly different – but the Powys-based resident is confident that his team are moving in the right direction.

“This morning things didn’t feel particularly great, as we were struggling to get the bike settled on corner entry but we improved this during the second session and introduced some of the solutions used at last week’s tests,” said Davies.

“My feeling with the bike is pretty different and we had to make some tweaks to the bike to suit these new parts during the session but I think we’re going in the right direction. It’s not really easy to turn the bike through the tight corners yet but this is something we’ll continue to work on tomorrow. Let’s say we still have work to do.”

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