Rain Mixes Up Magny-Cours Free Practice for Pata Yamaha with Brixx WorldSBK
Toprak Razgatlıoğlu and Andrea Locatelli completed an almost entirely wet Friday Free Practice on the opening day of the seventh round of the 2022 FIM Superbike World Championship, as the series resumed at Magny-Cours in France today.
The two Pata Yamaha with Brixx WorldSBK riders finished the day in third and fifth position respectively, with the best dry overall combined Free Practice times coming from just the first five minutes of the day. Inclement and intermittent rain followed for the rest of the day as the WorldSBK field tried to get to grips with fully wet track conditions.
With the weather set to gradually improve towards Sunday, Free Practice 3 at 09:00 (CEST) could provide a further opportunity to improve wet race set-ups or even start dry preparation in earnest, before Superpole qualifying at 11:10 and Race 1 at 14:00.
Toprak Razgatlıoğlu: P3 – 1’39.433
“Today we ride just the wet conditions and this morning it was not bad, and this afternoon we try to improve. Every time I am learning and improving in the wet! For some things we could improve in FP2 but the rear grip is still the same – we see the problem in the data and we can make this better. It looks like tomorrow morning we will also have some rain, we will try again to improve the set-up and now my feeling is we are nearly ready to race in the wet! But I hope this weekend we have dry conditions and we will try again for three wins. I’m not looking so much at the weather, I am just waiting to race now!”
Andrea Locatelli: P5 – 1’40.425
“It was a strange day, we did just three laps in the dry conditions and then it started to rain and we waited a bit in FP1 to see if it would stop. The feeling was great immediately in the dry conditions but to be honest in the wet it was not so good – but, in FP2 we understood something more and we understand what we want to do on the bike if it’s raining again. I wanted to ride and enjoy the dry track today but unfortunately it was wet, so we hope for the good weather because we have a good set-up and a good reference for me here in the dry conditions. In any case wet or dry, we will fine tune the set-up try to stay closer with the front guys and try to get the maximum.”
Paul Denning, Team Principal – Pata Yamaha with Brixx WorldSBK:
“It’s been a fairly standard early September Magny-Cours day – sunshine, showers, wind and everything else! Dry running was limited to only three laps at the start of FP1, but at least we’ve covered a lot of kilometres in the rain and with some good feedback from the riders and clear data on which to base improvements. Fingers crossed we will get more stable weather tomorrow and it certainly looks better for the two races on Sunday. Tonight, all we can work on is the feedback from the wet and the team will be doing everything we can to improve for those conditions if we get them.”
