Nurburgring. 2 qualifying

World Supersport Championship

Round 11

Nurburgring 7-9 September 2012

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 8.TH

That is strange but truth - for the second day sun and hot weather again in Nurburgring... and second day of very hard work inside Yakhnich Motorsport Team. In the morning free practice, maybe for the different asphalt temperature, the same bike of yesterday’s 2’00”2, was unable to ride better than 2’01”5... so we tested again to different set-up to solve the main problem of the week end: the noticeable bumping in some important points of the circuit makes bike unstable and does not allow Vladimir to enter the corners as fast as he normally does. And if we make the bike softer to fix this problem, then we lose grip under acceleration...

Harder, softer, harder, softer... a tricky game to play in our pit-box.

For qualifying again we prepared two different set-ups: harder than the morning and softer than the morning for the rear. Double work for Vladimir who had to be concentrated more on the setting for the race than finding the fastest lap for qualifying. Having lost the first Friday’s free practice it was costing a lot to our team and rider.

Ok, let’s work: two warm-up laps with the morning bike, 2’01”000, than stop. Change settings, change rear tyre, then two fast lap with the first setting: 2’00”7... and not good feeling of the bike. Let’s stop and go with the softer set-up and put the race tyre back. In one lap - 1’59”8, sixth position!!! Yessss, that’s the way. Ok, stop and put the softer tyre for another lap time... No way, only one lap, in 2’00”8 because of the traffic and some sliding problems in the rear.

In any case we got the same best qualifying position of the season in worst setting situation of the year, and using the race tyres... Not bad thinking towards tomorrow’s race, and hoping to adjust some settings during the morning warm up.

VLADIMIR LEONOV

“Again this morning we had very big difficulties in setting up the bike. Second qualifying was really a question mark for us, but fortunately we worked calm and decided to use qualifying as a second free practice, to set the bike up for the race. The second set-up was immediately better, and if I think eventually we obtained the best performance of the year with all this difficulties, We can be optimistic for the race. For the first time we are only 0,6 seconds away from the pole in a 2 minutes per lap circuit... Not bad, really!!”