The opening day of action for the seventh round of the 2016 FIM Superbike World Championship has drawn to a close at Donington Park, with Honda WorldSBK duo Nicky Hayden and Michael van der Mark eleventh and fifteenth, respectively, in the combined times of today’s two free practice sessions. Therefore, both riders will enter tomorrow’s first session of Superpole, with the goal to make it through and join today’s top-10 riders into the final fifteen minutes of qualifying.

In what has been a sunny and warm day in England’s East Midlands, race two winner at Sepang Nicky Hayden had to reacquaint himself with the 4.023 Km English track he last raced on back in 2009. The 34-year-old American was eighth at the end of free practice 1 and, at the end of the second session, he came only 0.116 seconds short of a top-10 finish after logging a 1’29.068 on his nineteenth lap.

Michael van der Mark had a difficult time in getting up to speed today, although he was able to lap one second quicker during FP2 compared to the morning session. The young Dutchman will continue to work hard with his crew in order to improve his feeling with the Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP around the iconic Donington Park circuit.

A 15-minute FP3 session will be contested tomorrow morning at 9:50 local time (GMT+1), with Superpole 1 set to get underway at 11:15 and race one at 15:00.

Nicky Hayden 69 - 11th/1'29.184

It wasn’t an easy day for sure. We were not able to be fast from the beginning, we tried some different options but this track needs such a great balance given the different nature between the fast and slow halves that you need to make a compromise, in terms of set-up and gearing, to make the bike work well from start to finish. My ideal time in the afternoon was not too bad, seventh fastest overall, but of course ideal times don’t work. There are definitely some areas where we know we need to improve; we need to make the right adjustments with an eye on the overall set-up and hopefully we’ll be able to do a better job tomorrow.

Michael van der Mark 60 - 15th/1'29.359

Today has been a difficult day and I’m surely not happy with how things went. The main problem this afternoon was braking, while this afternoon things started to get better. I did a long run that turned out to be quite encouraging and when I came back, we worked on some further changes. Unfortunately, we were a little bit on the limit with the suspension settings and we couldn’t improve our lap time in the end. To be honest, though, I think we’re in a better situation than our position today would suggest. I’m sure that, with some changes to the set-up, we can still go for a good qualifying result and be ready for the race.

Pieter Breddels - Technical Manager

This morning we focused a little bit on gearing but unfortunately it didn’t lead to an improvement, so we went back to the same ones we have been using for the past few seasons. We then did a lot of set-up work on electronics, engine braking and general handling of the bike. Nicky was very competitive in the first two splits but somehow he wasn’t able to be as quick in the second part of the track and that didn’t help him moving into the top 10. An eleventh place is not ideal, but we know what we need to do. Michael did a good long run in the afternoon but he wasn’t able to make the most of new tyres in the end, due to a small change that didn’t work out. We know he can be much faster than we he’s shown today over a single lap and we will now look ahead to tomorrow, as there is still big room for improvement.