AUSSIE Jason O’Halloran has revealed his delight with what he called one of his best Fridays of the season so far after finishing just a hair outside the top three today.

The McAMS Yamaha rider, who has had a luckless streak of non-finishes and crashes in four of the first six rounds this year, believes he’s headed in the right direction with his R1 this weekend with a mere 0.028s separating him from third-placed Josh Brookes in FP2 and less than half a second to leader Peter Hickman.

“All in all we’re happy, we made a little change at the end of FP2 which seemed positive so we’re going to go more that way tomorrow morning and see how it goes,” he said.

“This is the first round for a while where we’ve had a really good Friday and done plenty of laps,” he said. “We did a race distance on a tyre today which we’re happy with and did some pretty decent lap times as well.

“Around here everyone knows it’s tyre life, we’re all working for Sunday and trying to get the best out of the tyres. We just need to do plenty of laps, keep working at it and trying to find the sweet spot on the R1.”

While he admits it’s tempting to jump into the throttle at such a quick circuit, O’Halloran admitted it will be a practice in patience to keep on the good side of the Pirelli rubber come race day.

“It takes a little bit of time to get your head up to speed here. It’s a waiting game on the throttle – you open up the gas and you just sit and spin.

“It’s a tricky place it’s hard to get it right, but you’ve just got to do more and more laps - the more flow you have and the more rolling speed you can keep, the less tyre you use.”