Reigning MCE British Superbike champion Shane Byrne had what he described as the ‘best’ Friday practice session for a while, and that certainly appeared to be the case on-board the Be Wiser Panigale at Assen.
The Ducati man was the quickest rider during the second free practice session and went under lap record pace by 0.8 seconds. His 1’36.136 saw him go half a second faster than title challenger, JG Speedfit Kawasaki’s Leon Haslam.
His team kept the same setup with the bike from when they last visited the Dutch track 12 months ago and it has been a strong start so far. In the opening session, Byrne was narrowly pipped to the post by fellow showdown contender, Smiths BMW’s Peter Hickman.
Byrne was only one tenth off Hickman’s best time, and even though that was quick he improved even more to gain over one second from the morning, to afternoon outings. He spent the final sessions putting down long runs on the Pirelli tyres and managed to go even quicker again on a fresh tyre at the end of the 45 minute free practice.
“It has been our best Friday in a while. The bike is fundamentally the bike we raced with last year and we started with that and we did a couple of long runs and did a long run this afternoon, 13, 14 laps and that was really good and threw a tyre in at the end of the day to see if we could go a bit quicker again and managed to do that,” said Byrne at the track.
“I think we have half a second over the rest of the field at the minute which hasn’t happened for a long time. It is good to be back. The track this morning was quite bad but when you go out on the curves on the last section of the track they were really slippery. I went out onto the curves and in fifth gear my bike spun up, but this afternoon it was much better and the sun came out.”
