“I’m happy to be fastest, who knows what tomorrow can bring at Brands Hatch” declared Troy. “We still have to work on a few more little things but in general the day has gone OK. We tried a lot of tyres and on my race tyres I set a pretty good time, a flat 27, but I need to improve the bike set-up before I’m entirely satisfied. On my first lap on qualifiers at the end I had a big slide at Graham Hill Bend so I had to pass on that but I just managed to squeeze one more lap out of the tyre to set my time.”

“I’m so exhausted” said Ruben Xaus, “but things have got a lot better since Thursday morning when I was shaking with a high fever. It’s difficult to do a qualifying session when you feel like that but in the end on the bike it was not too bad. When eventually I had a tyre at the front that gave me confidence, it was quite late but then I put a qualifying tyre on the rear and I set my good lap. Really I was thinking so much about the way I was today so I wasn’t able to concentrate 100% on the bike. Tomorrow it’ll be better and I’m sure I can improve my time but for the moment I’m happy with third place. Now I’ve set a good time, I can concentrate on race set-up and get ready to do a good Superpole tomorrow”.

“We’ve still got some way to go at the moment, but Friday doesn’t mean much, tomorrow is the important day” declared Ben Bostrom. “The bike feels good and I’m pretty happy, but we played around too much in that session. I tried too many tyres and too many different gears. It’s OK though, tomorrow we’ll only focus on the set-up and things will improve for sure”.