Ryuichi Kiyonari and Josh Brookes were back on track on their HM Plant Honda Fireblade Superbikes today at Mallory Park, following a five week break as the British Superbike Championship recommences this weekend, to end the day in third and eighth respectively.

Kiyo had been making consistent progress throughout the two free practice sessions and in the final ten minutes of the second session he fired in a time to move to third, that remained unchallenged. Josh meanwhile had a more challenging start to the weekend as he ended the day eighth following setting changes that didn’t work to his advantage, however, he is ready to make amends tomorrow ahead of qualifying.

Kiyo said,

“I am happy to be third today, it is a good start for me and the HM Plant Honda team. We have been still trying to work on what we have learnt at the recent rounds and tests; we have the basic settings from Cadwell Park and we are just making slight adjustments which is where we found the improvement. We have continued to work today on balance and the suspension settings and I think that tomorrow we can challenge for the front row in qualifying.”

Josh said,

“Today hasn’t gone how I wanted; I am obviously not happy being eighth on the timesheets and I intend on putting that right tomorrow before qualifying. We have gone from riding the Superstock Honda at Silverstone last weekend to a Superbike at Mallory Park so it was always going to be different, but it just hasn’t clicked for me today. We made some changes this morning that were different from what we have worked on before when we tested both here and at Darley Moor which just didn’t seem to work, so tomorrow we are going to revert back to what we know and go from there. I need to get the HM Plant Honda Fireblade working better through the slow corners, but we know the potential is there so we just need to refine it.”