WSB Rd. 7, Brno, Czeck Republik, Friday 21th July, 2006
Weather: sunny & showers 33° C
Track: dry 50° C

Winston Ten Kate Honda’s Karl Muggeridge finished a more than respectable 5th overall in today’s opening qualifying session of the 7th round of the World Superbike Championship here at Brno in Czech Republic.

The track temperatures where unbelievable this afternoon and raised 5° C within a few minutes to the beginning of the session. There wasn’t much grip on the track with these temperatures and it was a slippery session for everyone with a big storm shower in the last 2 minutes as well.

Muggas comments: “We are struggling a fair bit with grip here in Brno, probably like everyone else too. The track conditions are nothing like when we were testing around 6 weeks ago and our settings from there don’t seem to work at all. We’ve tried to make the bike a bit softer this afternoon to get more traction, the front is not too bad, but we still have a lot of work to do on the rear, because our lap by lap times are not fast enough at the moment for the race. So right now we have to focus on how we can get out of the corners faster. Once we’ve done that, and I’m confident we can, we should be OK.”

Ronald Ten Kate: “Quite a good start to the race weekend and although it’s only the first day, this is a very good place to start from. James and Karl were fas immediately and we had the luxury to concentrate on the race set-up and race tyres. We’ve seen and incredible track temperature of 52 ° C during that afternoon session, so we will see where we end up tomorrow. I hope the temperature will drop off a bit over the weekend, because I think this is almost too much. I am sure we can improve the bike even more for tomorrow.”