Rumours at Jerez suggest that there could be a change in the WorldSBK weekend race schedule for 2018, with three practice sessions on Fridays to give the teams more opportunity to make fundamental changes in their setup.

Fridays at race weekend in 2017 featured two one hour long sessions, then a 25 minute FP3 session on Saturdays before Superpole and then race one also on Saturday – for the Superbike class. Then race two would take place on Sunday. Only Qatar strayed far from that norm, with races on Friday and Saturday in 2017.

Now the proposal under discussion is for three 40 minute sessions on day one, allowing three basic machine set-ups to be evaluated for each rider, not two as now. Important to some in the era of one rider one bike.

Another whisper of a possible change is that there may be three races on a weekend at the UK and Portuguese rounds. Maybe also Argentina, if it goes ahead, according to some.

As things stand TV schedules dictate that there are two races per weekend in most of Europe, on Saturday and Sunday, and they each have to start at 13.00 CET to maximise the viewing figures. With the UK and Portugal sharing a time zone one hour behind the rest of Europe, they are the ideal ‘exception’ rounds to at least try out the idea of a triple header weekend – one race on Saturday and two on Sunday.