VIDEO: Michael Laverty's high speed qualifying smash

Michael Laverty’s weekend went from bad to worse at Oulton Park as he barrel-rolled out of this afternoon’s opening qualifying session.

The Northern Irishman has struggled with his McAMS Yamaha YZF-R1 all weekend, starting out with an entirely new chassis as the team attempt to fix the chatter issues that have plagued him since the start of the year.

An engine swap between FP1 and FP2 was what would eventually cure the chatter, but a blown clutch in FP3 left the McAMS team with even more work ahead of qualifying, where disaster would strike as Laverty tucked the front on entry to the high speed Cascades turn.

While the rider was OK, his bike was completely destroyed leaving the team with the task of re-building the R1 ahead of tomorrow’s opening race.

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“It’s been a total disaster so far,” Laverty told MCN. “I’ve given the team a lot of work trying various things already so to have that crash in qualifying and give them the extra work of rebuilding another bike isn’t great.

“It’s been tough, the harder I try the slower I go. I went out on a hard tyre and I wasn’t fast enough to get into Q2 so I put a soft tyre in and went through turn one, was two tenths up and thinking all was going well but as I trail braked into Cascades the front just went. It caught me out, I didn’t expect it to let go there. We’d been working on fixing a vague feeling I had with the front and I thought moving my weight forwards was working so it’s a bit frustrating.” 

“What a brave cameraman we’ve got down there… hats off to him!” pic.twitter.com/llOmKlmH7l

— Eurosport UK (@Eurosport_UK) April 30, 2017

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