The Pata Honda duo of Jonathan Rea and Leon Haslam were back on track today for round five of the World Superbike championship at Donington Park in the UK.

With an additional free practice session today, Tom Sykes set the fastest overall time as the two Pata Honda riders took their Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP to eighth and ninth places respectively in the time sheets. In spite of threatened rain, all three 45-minute sessions at the 4.023km Donington Park circuit stayed dry.

However, tomorrow’s forecast features heavy rain with a fourth free practice session followed by an earlier-than-normal Superpole going at 12.00 local time to determine final grid positions for Sunday’s two 23-lap fifth-round races.

Jonathan Rea - P8

Honestly, it’s been a tough day to get a good base setting around here. We started from zero with our electronics here so we came to our initial setting with information from last year. It seems like we’ve been chasing a engine brake setting all day but the good news is that in the final session we found some improvement so I think we’re on top of that. It seems like we wasted a lot of time concentrating on that and it seems like the forecast for tomorrow is not so good to continue in the final free practice with a dry set-up. But, if this afternoon was our final dry session before the race, we have some ideas to go with. It’s not been a perfect day but we can take some positives that we’ve improved the bike. I guess tomorrow we’ll focus on our wet set-up and see what happens on Sunday.

Leon Haslam - P9

We didn’t really make much progress between sessions one and two, and we could really have done with a night’s sleep then to think about everything and make a better step to session three as normal! So, yeah, it’s been tough having three sessions today and we lost a bit of progression. We can see the issues though, and we know where they are, so I’m confident we can make a step. We could use another dry session, but it looks like the weather is going to say otherwise. So we need to make some progress, sure, but it’s not as bad as it looks on the timing sheets!

Pieter Breddels - technical co-ordinator

Both riders have been struggling a little with chassis setting and engine brake issues today. It feels like we are a session behind our competitors and finishing eighth and ninth is certainly not what we were hoping for when we started this morning. We have some good ideas for tomorrow but it looks like it will be wet so that will change the game all over again. Yes, we have some work to do!

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