World Superbike / Supersport 2005 - Round Six

Steve Martin will start tomorrow's races at the sixth round of the Superbike World Championship from the second row of the Misano grid.

The Australian made consistent progress throughout a sweltering day and, with an accomplished lap of 1:36.147, leapt five places up the grid into eighth place. That time, 0.8 seconds off Troy Corser's polesetting pace, was backed up by an afternoon free practice time of 1:37.161 on race tyres to leave Steve feeling cautiously optimistic.

Steve, whose previous best qualifying for FPR was second at Phillip Island, said: "I am pretty happy to have made the second row, although I am not going to get ahead of myself because I want to finish both races in the points. But it's my second best qualifying on the PETRONAS FP1 and I feel much better about tomorrow's races than I have at the last few meetings. We definitely worked hard to achieve that and we made headway every minute today and we really want to get good results here. The set-up is pretty much there and I was also able to do pretty quick times on race tyres this afternoon."

Team-mate Garry McCoy made a valiant effort to bounce back from yesterday's set-up struggles but narrowly missed out on a place in Superpole, despite slicing nearly two seconds off his best time of yesterday. His fastest lap, of 1:37.163, was set on the second flying lap on his second qualifying tyre and, even though he almost lost the front end in the penultimate chicane of that lap, he finished just 0.3 seconds outside the top 16.

He said: "I think we are getting pretty close to being dialled in with the chassis. I had a problem with the mapping in my engine in the afternoon session but, despite that, I was able to get into the low 38s on race tyres. With the problem solved, I am confident of getting into the 37s in the races. I am starting a long way back on the grid and it's going to be tough to get into the points, so I will be looking for a good start to move up a few places early on."