WSBK Portimao: Marco Melandri on provisional pole

Marco Melandri has set his sights on tomorrow afternoon’s Superpole at Portimao, the Italian who left Nurburgring with double zero and lost his very brief championship leadership to title rival Max Biaggi, dominated the first qualifying practice (he won race 2 last year) with a best lap of 1.43.196 with 10 minutes left in the session and the rest of the field had to play catch-up.

Eugene Laverty took the second spot but he pushed it in the final minutes to try to close the gap and he was followed by this morning’s front runner and championship title pretender Tom Sykes, who more than half a second slower, but both were much faster than Aprilia’s Max Biaggi who was 7th and eight tenths from the top of the timesheets.

Jonathan Rea was fourth ahead of his next year’s rumored team mate to be Leon Haslam, while Leon Camier and Carlos Checa were 6th and 8th respectively, and the gap separating the four riders was just a little more than one tenth of second.

Michel Fabrizio on the satellite BMW was 9th while Nurburgring winner Chaz Davies rounded out the top ten. Ayrton Badovini dropped back to 11th followed by Pata Aprilia’s Sylvain Guintoli, Loris Baz, David Salom was 14th and back on his Pedercini Kawasaki after his MotoGP CRT debut at Misano where he finished 14th. Davide Giugliano was just 15th and Lorenzo Zanetti closed out the sixteen provisional Superpole riders.

WSBK Portimao QP1 results:

01- Marco Melandri – BMW Motorrad Motorsport – BMW S1000RR – 1’43.196
02- Eugene Laverty – Aprilia Racing Team – Aprilia RSV4 Factory – + 0.384
03- Tom Sykes – Kawasaki Racing Team – Kawasaki ZX-10R – + 0.535
04- Jonathan Rea – Honda World Superbike Team – Honda CBR 1000RR – + 0.690
05- Leon Haslam – BMW Motorrad Motorsport – BMW S1000RR – + 0.725
06- Leon Camier – FIXI Crescent Suzuki – Suzuki GSX-R 1000 – + 0.753
07- Max Biaggi – Aprilia Racing Team – Aprilia RSV4 Factory – + 0.800
08- Carlos Checa – Althea Racing – Ducati 1198 – + 0.803
09- Michel Fabrizio – BMW Motorrad Italia GoldBet – BMW S1000RR – + 1.177
10- Chaz Davies – ParkinGO MTC Racing – Aprilia RSV4 Factory – + 1.194

with twowheelsblog