Pata Honda rider Jonathan Rea set the fourth-fastest combined lap time in today’s opening free practice sessions at Magny-Cours in France in preparation for Sunday’s two 11th-round World Superbike championship races.

The British rider took his Pata Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP around the 4.411km circuit in a time of 1m38.157s, just 0.2s off the provisional pole time of Italian Davide Guigliano.

Rea’s Pata Honda team-mate, Leon Haslam, was fourth fastest himself in this morning’s first free practice but the 31-year-old could only marginally improve his time this afternoon and ended the day in tenth place overall.

Haslam will have an opportunity to improve his position in tomorrow’s third free practice session ahead of the afternoon Superpole which will determine the grid for Sunday’s two 21-lap races at Magny-Cours.

Jonathan Rea - P4, 1m38.157s

I’m quite satisfied with our day to be honest, although we had a couple of problems. We got off to a steady start in the first session but had a bit of a misunderstanding over the direction we wanted to go, which lost us a bit of time. But during the break the guys worked well, especially in the electronics area where we made a lot of improvements. This afternoon I was able to do a run and got into a rhythm and went steadily faster. When I tried with the new tyre at the end I was feeling really, really good, but I made some mistakes on the lap so it was frustrating that the lap time wasn’t better. But the bike is really user-friendly here and it’s important to have a bike that you can race hard for 21 laps at Magny-Cours. We’ve got a good base setting now that we should be able just to fine-tune t o aim for the front row tomorrow.

Leon Haslam - P10, 1m39.040s

I was quite happy with this morning. We had to try a few things and needed to work on some other settings. This afternoon we had a little bit of a problem but I think we know what it is and how to work on it so we can start again tomorrow. I was P4 this morning and felt pretty confident with what we were doing. Unfortunately this afternoon we couldn’t make any improvement but we found the issue, which should allow us to make a good step tomorrow.

Pieter Breddels - technical co-ordinator

We didn’t have a smooth session with Jonathan this morning and we lost a lot of time which meant that our plan to do a lot of laps didn’t work out. Fortunately, things turned around quite a bit this afternoon and we managed to improve the settings and rideability. This brought him fourth place and he’s really close to the front runners so he’s happy with that. It was a little bit of the opposite with Leon because he was close to the front in fourth this morning and it looked really promising. In the afternoon it came to a bit of a standstill and he just managed to do the same lap time as this morning. We’ll have to look at why we went in the wrong direction and improve that for tomorrow.

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