World Superbike News

It proved to be a difficult and disappointing weekend for the Ten kate Honda team and riders at Misano last week.

After two days of poor qualifying the team were still struggling to find pace with the Honda CBR1000RR, with Carlos Checa qualifying in eleventh place.

Checa had issues with grip on his bike throughout qualifying but as other riders crashed-out at the front of the pack in race one, it enabled him to make progress and saw him finish in fifth position.

The second race was stopped early after a crash left oil on the track as Checa struggled to regain a good position and had dropped to eighteenth place by the end of lap one but somehow managed to pull it back and finish the race in eighth place.

Checa’s team-mates, Ryuichi Kiyonari and Kenan Sofuloglu were also trying to find Superbike race pace on their machines.  Sofuoglu finished the first race in eighteenth place but crashed-out on the first lap on race two.  Kiyonari made a jump start on race one and ended in fourteenth place and on race two made a hesitant start but managed to make thirteenth position at the finish.

Ronald ten Kate, the Team manager said after the race,

“It didn’t take and expert’s opinion to see it was going to be difficult today to get some good results after the poor qualifying.  In the first race we got away with a fifth place after some of the faster guys in the field crashed out.

In the second race Carlos had a difficult situation after an imperfect start.  At the end of the day the damage is not as bad as I thought it would be after qualifying.

We are now going for a test in Vallelunga and will obviously have some work to do to get our bikes on the pace again.  We don’t go out racing to make the numbers and want to be up front again for the next round in Brno.

Sofuoglu and Kiyonari were both in difficult situations from their places on the grid.  It was almost impossible for them to bring some good results back home.  Let’s see if we can turn this around and come back strongly at Brno.”