2006 Superbike World Championship Round 11, Imola, Italy
Circuit: 4.959 kms. Weather: Dry, sunny/cloudy 22-26C
Friday qualifying, 29th September
PROVISIONAL FRONT ROW FOR TROY AND YUKIO.
Team Alstare Suzuki Corona Extra riders Troy Corser and Yukio
Kagayama made a steady start on the first day of qualifying
at Imola and posted the second and fourth fastest times respectively.
Both riders had tyre grip problems in the afternoon when the
temperature rose - a situation that has been with the team
all season. James Toseland (Honda) set the day’s fastest
lap, with a time of 1:50.039. In third place today, between
Troy and Yukio is series leader Troy Bayliss (Ducati)
TROY - 2nd, 1:50.250
I had a little crash at the start of the afternoon session,
but don’t really know why. According to the telemetry
my throttle position was the same as the lap before, so maybe
I was on an old tyre, I don’t know. I banged myself
a little , but no real damage, and I rode the bike back to
the pits OK. I jumped on my spare bike and carried on working
on a good set-up for the race. I'm reasonably happy with the
bike’s set-up and our main concern is the tyres. When
the temperature rises, we lose grip. When it’s hot,
we can find a tyre that will last a race distance OK, but
it’ll mean much slower lap times. I had quite a lot
of wheelspin here today, but I guess that’s because
of the nature of the layout. There are lot of camber changes
and fast elevated turns and the bike seems to spin slide quite
a bit. It’s an area we’ll work on in tomorrow
morning’s warm-up
YUKIO - 4th, 1:50.357
In the morning, I believed that I’d finish with a lap
in the 1:49s this afternoon, but when the temperature rose,
it was not possible to do this time. As we’ve seen before,
our tyres do not seem to like the heat so much and the lap
times come down. My feeling was quite good in the morning
and the only real problem was braking in to the corners. I
pushed hard in the afternoon, but it made no big difference
to my lap times. Tomorrow morning we’ll change the rear
spring to start off and see if we can go faster.
Friday qualifying
1 Toseland (GB-Honda) 1:50.039, 2 TROY CORSER (Aus-Alstare
Suzuki Corona Extra) 1:50.250, 3 Bayliss (Aus-Ducati) 1:50.265,
4 YUKIO KAGAYAMA (J-Alstare Suzuki Corona Extra) 1:50.357,
5 Barros (Bra-Honda) 1:50.388, 6 Xaus (E-Ducati) 1:50.468,
7 Pitt (Aus-Yamaha) 1:50.502, 8 Fabrizio (I-Honda) 1:50.553,
9 MAX NEUKIRCHNER (D-Alstare Engineering Corona Extra) 1:50.659,
10 Clementi (I-Ducati) 1:50.768,
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