The HM Plant Honda team endured a disappointing qualifying session at Silverstone today for the penultimate round of the British Superbike Championship Showdown as Shane 'Shakey' Byrne and Ryuichi Kiyonari will line up on the fourth row for tomorrow’s opening race.

Shakey will start from 13th on the grid for the opening race as the former double champion continued to suffer with chatter issues that prevented him from moving further up the order in this afternoon’s three stage qualifying session. The team are now working on some radical changes to try and resolve the issue ahead of tomorrow’s critical two races.

Kiyo meanwhile made several changes with the electronics system following the final free practice session to revert back to the Motec system that he had been using at previous rounds of the championship after changing to a kit ECU during free practice yesterday and this morning. Kiyo will start 16th on the grid and knows that he faces two challenging races tomorrow to move up the order in his quest to retain his title.

In the National Superstock 1000 Championship Jason O’Halloran will start from 18th on the grid as he suffered a technical problem during the final qualifying session, which left him unable to improve his starting position on his racing return.

Shakey said:

“I am absolutely devastated with how qualifying turned out today for myself and the HM Plant Honda team. It has been a difficult weekend so far and I was really looking forward to this round as I love the track but it hasn’t come together yet. The team have been working hard to try and solve the issues we have been having but at the moment we just can’t get to the bottom of the chatter problems. We are going to try something radically different in the morning to try and see if we can improve it and then we hope to do something special in the races tomorrow.”

Kiyo said:

“This morning we made a big change with the suspension and setting to try and improve the turning and exit speed, but this caused us other problems. For qualifying we changed back to the electronics system we used before this weekend as we thought that we could improve more with that, but we haven’t found what we need yet. We will try and stay with it now for tomorrow and see what we can improve in the morning, but it is going to be difficult. I will still be trying but it won’t be easy in the races.”

Jason said:

“We had a few technical issues which cost me the track time in qualifying and that prevented me from making any further progress. It was a hard session and it will be difficult in the race tomorrow but we are feeling good that we can get a good start and make some progress in the race.”

Team Manager Havier Beltran concluded:

“It has been the most difficult qualifying session of the season so far for the HM Plant Honda team, having both riders outside the top ten means that they both have their work cut out for race one tomorrow. However I am confident that the HM Plant Honda team can turn things around so that we can be in a better position for the races and then the second grid. In the Superstock class we had a technical misfire that we have been evaluating this evening and that unfortunately meant Jason wasn’t able to qualify higher. We have now got to look ahead to tomorrow and turning things around in the races.”