Qualifying. Leonov is 8th in rain Assen!!!!
World Supersport Championship
Round 3
Assen 20-22 april 2012
Saturday 21.th april
The terrible announced Assen typical weather at least arrived Saturday morning. Cold, windy, rain. No hope to have a dry free practice in the morning, so Yakhnich Team decided to test two different settings for the announced (again...) Sunday wet race...
As expected, Vladimir Leonov immediately found a good mood in this conditions, even if, in reality, rain stopped to came as the session begame, and the asphalt was not in the “full wet” conditions for half of the session.
In the beginning he was second, then third. Then stopped to change setting and put new tyre. But unfortunately this tyre had a defected, so after two laps went back to box to change again. One or two laps to take confidence with new setting, and again he was in the fastest group, finishing fourth, after Lanzi, Lowes and Nemeth, and ahead of riders like Parkes, Cluzel, Sofuoglu...
Rain was announced even for second qualifying, but fortunately it wasn’t... and team had the way to test a completely new setting for dry condition. Even we tested a new hard compound rear tyre in the first part of the session, just in case tomorrow the race will be on dry conditions with low temperature, this could be the right choose.
With the new setting the feeling was immediately better, and after the work with the new tyre, team decided to put another hard tyre, to test a second option for the race.
With this configuration Vladimir finded immediately a good feeling, and he was able after three laps to sign 1’40”289... Half second better than Friday qualifying, while the majority of the riders couldn’t improve there performance respect yesterday. With this time Vladimir install the Yakhnich Team R6 up to the 8.th position.
8 minutes to the end, team recall him at box to put the soft tyre for the final attach. But this time the good feeling finally founded with the bike betrayed Vladimir, that loose the front in the fast corner number 8. So, it was no possible to improve his 8.th position, even if on the datas we know that the potential to do 1’39”8- 1’39”7 is in the bike, is in the rider... at it would have signified to be around the 5.th position.
No problem Vladimir, we are more than happy with this first absolute second row of the History for a russian rider, and for a russian team in a world championship class.
We are improving our performances step by step, and being in the second row at the third race of our History, is something incredible right now!
VLADIMIR LEONOV: “Yesterday after first qualifying I was a little upset, because I knew we had the potential to do better than 11.th, but for many reasons we didn’t. Today I crashed, but I’m happy, because finally our session was good from the beginning, and we worked very well to obtain the result we can expect. I’ve I good feeling with the bike, and it is good that our performances increase race by race”.