Be Wiser Ducati’s Shane Byrne believes he will have a lot of setup work to do with the fickle Panigale at Knockhill MCE British Superbike round after it gave the Kent man a ‘wake-up call’ at last week’s Snetterton test.

Byrne has realised the bike needs a lot of tweaking from track to track and says he will start with a base setting that is between the one that carried him to victory at Brands Indy and those he used while testing at the Scottish track earlier in the year.

“I had envisaged two really difficult rounds at Brands Hatch Indy and Knockhill. We tested up at Knockhill a few weeks’ ago and if I am perfectly honest all we worked on was throttle translation and how the bike delivered its power. We didn’t especially drive ourselves mad to set the bike up for Knockhill and to be honest the bike wasn’t very nice to ride around there because of that,” said Byrne.

“Right towards the end of the afternoon when we had made some progress we did do a bit of work with the bike and we did get down to a pretty reasonable lap time. We didn’t get down to that time comfortably but it was doable. As I said I thought Brands Hatch Indy and Knockhill would be two difficult rounds, but then we went out and won at the last round so I wouldn’t say I arrive there this weekend feeling super, super confident.

“The bike gave me a bit of a wakeup call at the test last week; perhaps I was still in a bit of Caribbean mode or something, but when I first rode it at Snetterton I turned up for the test thinking that it worked great at Brands Hatch so we should be able to go good around Snetterton. I generally go pretty well there so expected to do the same but we did get a little bit of a shock.

“We start at Knockhill with the settings somewhere between Brands Hatch and the Knockhill test that we did and hopefully that gets us off to a good start and we will then see what happens and try and have another two strong races.”