It was a challenging opening day of action for the Honda WorldSBK Team at Imola’s ‘Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari’ today, where the fifth round of the 2016 FIM Superbike World Championship is currently underway. At the end of Friday’s two one-hour long free practice sessions, Michael van der Mark ended up 14th while Nicky Hayden, who did his first laps of the Italian track on his Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP, was 16th at the chequered flag of FP2. Therefore, unlike every other race so far this year, both riders will have to take part into Superpole 1 tomorrow.

Van der Mark and his crew worked hard to find a base set-up for the Dutchman’s Fireblade machine on the Italian track, which was partially resurfaced over the winter in two areas: from the uphill section leading to to ‘Acque Minerali’ (turns 10 and 11) to the ‘Variante Alta’ (turn 14) and between the two ‘Rivazza’ corners (turns 18 and 19) to the pit lane entrance. With today’s data to analyse, the team will plan further changes to the settings of the bike, which will be evaluated during tomorrow morning’s 15-minute FP3 – scheduled at 8:45.

Nicky Hayden had his first taste of the iconic Italian track, which lived up to its fame of being a difficult one to learn. The American was able to set his fastest time of the day with a couple of minutes left in today’s action and he is now looking forward to trying some new settings ahead of Superpole.

Michael van der Mark 60 - 14th/1.49.166

I would lie if I say I’m happy with how things have gone today. It looks like we have yet to find the key to be quick on this track and this has certainly put us on the back foot somewhat, because so far this year we have always been competitive right from the off. I have a feeling we have been skirting around the problems today, but I’m confident that the guys will find a way to make the bike work as well as it did before.

Nicky Hayden 69 - 16th/1'49.364

Overall it hasn’t been a positive day. Learning such a difficult track with this many elevation changes is never easy, plus there have been many little things that haven’t gone our way. Because of all this we couldn’t build any rhythm and make progress, and so now we have to try and make our way through Superpole 1. It’s really hard to tell how much is me being new here, or the bike set-up, because even Michael had his own struggles today. Right now, all we need to do is to get it together and refocus for tomorrow; hopefully we’ll be able to turn things around.

Pieter Breddels - Technical Manager

We’re obviously not happy with today’s results as we were expecting to be much higher up the timing sheets. We are now analysing the data gathered today but it seems that for some reason we struggled to find a setup that could give us a good grip around this track, and that applies to both riders. Of course, for Nicky it was also his first day of action here, which didn’t help. We now have a bit of time to go through everything in order to get a fresh start tomorrow morning.