World Superbike / Supersport 2005 - Round Seven

Garry McCoy will start from the third row of the grid after a rousing qualifying performance for tomorrow’s Superbike World Championship round seven races at the Czech Republic circuit of Brno.

The Australian edged out the likes of Frankie Chili and Nori Haga in securing the final Superpole slot by one hundredth of a second. He then sliced another half a second off his best time with an eye-catching Superpole lap to leap up a whole row and qualify in 12th place.

Troy Corser claimed pole position with the only lap in the 2:02s but just 0.2 seconds separated Garry’s time of 2:03.9 from the factory Ducati of Regis Laconi at the head of the third row.

Steve Martin also made further progress, improving his best lap of yesterday by more than a second to finish the morning session 14th fastest, although he missed out on Superpole by just three places.

Garry said: “Having just missed out on the top 16 yesterday, and having just squeezed into Superpole this morning, it’s awesome to have moved up a whole row in Superpole. I couldn’t have asked much more from my lap. I am only 0.2 seconds behind one of the factory Ducati bikes at a place where you need a lot of bottom end power, so I must be making up time on the brakes and with corner speed. I have seen the bikes of people like Abe and Chili out on track and they are so much quicker out of the corners. But everyone is having problems spinning up the race tyres a bit more than we are and I am hoping that they might burn them out towards the end of the race. At the start of the race, when things are tightly packed, we might lose a few places on the straights so we need a good start if a top 10 finish is going to be realistic. We have got pretty close with suspension set-up and tyre choice but need to do a bit more work on a clutch problem overnight.”

Steve said: “I was pretty happy to improve by another second in morning qualifying and we were really unfortunate not to be in Superpole. It’s one of those things you want to be involved in, although I do not think it is too much of a penalty for the race to have missed out. I think I have learned the track pretty well and I went quicker again this afternoon on race tyres, which is a positive. I also want to try a few things with the gearing for morning warm-up but I am happy with my race set-up and the team has worked well and methodically. I am starting on the row behind where the points start so, if I can have the kind of first lap that I have been having recently, then hopefully I can go forward through the field.”