Aruba Ducati’s Chaz Davies was able to keep a gap of one-tenth to fastest man Jonathan Rea during the second WorldSBK free practice session at Assen despite his Panigale behaving a little like a ‘wild bull’ in some areas of the Dutch track.

Davies ended the day in second and believes he is close on laptimes and tyre life but feels he wants to work a bit more on pace leading up to tomorrow’s opening race.

“I feel a little wide of the mark in some areas but we are not that wide when it comes to laptimes. We want to tidy up a few things tomorrow and focus on our pace a little bit but generally it’s not been a bad first day at all,” said Davies, speaking at the track.

“We did a medium-size run, the lap times came more easily towards the end and the tyres looked quite good, so that’s positive. We just need to tidy up a few things, in particular we need to get more stability as the bike behaves a bit wildly here and there, especially in the faster parts of the track, in order to get it to turn better from straight braking until the apex.

“The bike is a little bit of a wild bull at the moment, in a few places she is bucking and kicking so we want to try and calm that down a bit but otherwise not too bad.”