Weather: sunny 26° C
Track: dry, 49° C

Winston Ten Kate Honda’s Karl Muggeridge qualified on the provisional third place for tomorrow’s Superpole Session at round four of the World Superbike Championship here at Monza Autodromo in Italy.

Muggeridge spent a lot of time thinking about the handling of the CBR 1000 and how it could be improved since the rather sad weekend at Valencia two weeks ago. And after long discussions with the suspension and data crew they seemed to have found a more balanced setting which makes the bike much easier to ride than before. In fact Muggas mentioned happily: “I can actually ride the bike now, as before the beast was riding me and I hang on praying it doesn’t throw me off”

Karl lapped the 5’793 meter long circuit in 1’48.203 on his race-tyres which is faster than Laconi’s last year Superpole time on a Q with 1’48.258. On his qualifying lap Muggas matched his race tyre time with 1’48.281, so he didn’t really get any better time out of the soft tyre as he went a bit too easy on it.

Muggas comments: “We made a lot of good changes today with the re-evolution on the chassis the bike feels a lot more user-friendly. I’m very happy with the progress we made so far but we will have to keep working to find a bit more grip and fine tune the handling plus there is also some improvement still to be made on the brakes. The Qualifying lap was a bit a waste of the tyre, I nursed it too much on my first lap and thought I could get a second one in with it, instead of going hard on it right away. It showed half way through the second lap that it was definitely built only for one lap. Anyway I’m happy enough with where we ended up today, and know there’s more to come for tomorrow’s sessions.”