BSB: Haslam making up for lost testing time

Leon Haslam remains upbeat despite a tough opening day to the sixth round of the MCE British Superbike Championship at Brands Hatch.

The JG Speedfit Kawasaki star headed in to this weekend feeling much fitter than he did three weeks ago at Snetterton after his nasty Knockhill crash, so was expecting to be pushing back towards the front this weekend.

Having missed vital testing time earlier this week at Cadwell, Haslam’s team spent the day working on the balance of his ZX-10R and improving tyre life, and as a result of that work he didn’t have the opportunity to push for a lap time.

After ending up 11^th in FP1, he improved to sixth in the second session but admits while they aren’t a million miles away there’s still work to do.  

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“We’ve not really ridden properly since Oulton Park. At Snetterton we didn’t really learn anything, I missed the Snett test, missed the Cadwell test and didn’t do Knockhill, so the last time I raced was in May.

“We’ve had a few ideas with the bike and what we want to do. Everyone has been progressing, so for me now we need to put those ideas into force. We tried a few things today but didn’t quite go in the right direction, but that said I’m not a million miles away from what I know I can be doing. We’ve got a lot of work to do but at the same time it’s all coming together.

“We’ve been playing a lot with the balance of the bike and obviously that affects other things. It gives us an idea on tyre life but at the same time we’ve not had much time to put it in force, once you change all that balance everything else changes. We’re just missing testing time.” 

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