The fifth round of the 2016 FIM Superbike World Championship has drawn to a close at Imola’s ‘Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari’, with Honda WorldSBK Team’s Nicky Hayden and Michael van der Mark in 8th and 9th places, respectively, at the end of race two in Italy. The encounter, which took place in dry conditions over the full 19-lap distance, was won by Great Britain’s Chaz Davies.

Hayden got a great start from the third row of the grid and was running sixth before losing three positions at the end of lap one. The experienced American battled hard with Althea BMW’s Jordi Torres and Markus Reiterberger in the middle of the race and, as the laps went by, he consolidated eighth place up to the chequered flag. Michael van der Mark spent the majority of the encounter on the edge of the top 10 and was able to make up a couple of positions in the final laps, crossing the line 1.4secs behind his teammate.

With five rounds completed, Michael van der Mark sits fourth in the championship standings, while Nicky Hayden is seventh. The next round of the World Superbike championship will take place in Malaysia at the Sepang International Circuit on May 13–15.

Nicky Hayden 69 - 8th

We made some changes overnight that unfortunately we couldn’t try during the warm up as the track was still partially wet. We decided to keep the settings for the race anyway and the bike was a little bit better; I was able to make the same lap-times as in race one despite using the harder tyre, which we had to choose given the lower temperatures compared to yesterday. Maybe it took me a little longer to understand the changes at the beginning and that cost me a bit of time. Overall it has been a difficult weekend; regardless, the team was able to improve the bike over the weekend and I had to learn the track, which in the end wasn’t too difficult. I hope next year we’ll be faster around here and now I’m looking forward to Sepang.

Michael van der Mark 60 - 9th

It’s been a really difficult weekend. It looked like we found the right direction yesterday in Superpole but today we thought that, with a different tyre, we would have solved the issues encountered yesterday. Unfortunately during race two I found it really hard to change direction and this meant that I could neither be quick nor build any sort of rhythm. Now we have to look forward to Sepang, which is a completely different track. I’m pretty confident that the team and I will be able to bounce back and score some great results there.

Pieter Breddels - Technical Manager

We had some adjustments in mind for today and surely, if the conditions were drier this morning, we would have had a clearer indication about them. Michael was able to do a couple of laps with slicks and that gave us a little bit of information, while Nicky stayed out on wet tyres. With the new set-up and the different tyres used, both riders were able to get the bikes stopped better than yesterday, although this translated into a harder time in changing direction. After losing basically the whole first day while trying to find a set-up with the wrong tyres, we had to play catch-up yesterday and today. Now we need to analyse what happened in order to be ready for the next race.