Nurburgring. 1 qualifying

World Supersport Championship

Round 11

Nurburgring 7-9 September 2012

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER  7.TH

A nice and sunny day awaited the WSBK circus on the Nurburgring circuit.

Team Yakhnich Motorsport felt comfortable here and was not confused by the historycal racing atmosphere of the place. In fact, from the first session, we had to be more than concentrated on the bike setting, because of an electrical failure in the electronic system  what made Vladimir stop at the box and miss quite all the first free practice session. We lost the possibility to find an improvement in the suspension and fight the terrible bumping our bike suffered in many corners of the track.

So, for qualifying, the team  had to work double setting up the bike, and doing the best laptime possible. To do so, we had prepared two different rear shock solutions, and decided to start with the morning one, do the laptime, than change the shock and try to find a better setting, to solve the problems we had seen in the data recorded during the few laps made in the morning. The first run with the soft tyre had not been bad, but Vladimir was only 13th fastest, lapping in 2’01”5.

When Leonov rode back into the pits we had only 14 minutes before the end of the session. The mechanics changed the rear shock and the rear tyre in only 7 minutes, giving Vladimir a chance to go out again for a final run of three laps... And he did very well, signing 2’00”2 at the second of the three laps, despite being disturbed by another rider in the last section. Leonov is 6th fastest after the first qualifying, matching his performance in Moscow two weeks ago... Not a bad starting position!

VLADIMIR LEONOV

“I was nervous after free practice and even after the first part of qualifying, because the bike suffered a lot of problems in stability, breaking and entering corners. I felt lot of movements, and no good feeling in the front. But fortunately my team worked very calm and in the right direction to fix this problem. The solution we’ve found seems to be right, and now I feel much more confident, so we were able to obtain a good starting position ”.