Pata Honda riders Sylvain Guintoli and Michael van der Mark found things far from easy in today’s opening two Free Practice sessions for round five of the World Superbike championship at Imola in Italy.

The Honda CBR1000RR-mounted pair ended the day in 10th and 13th places respectively following the two 45-minute sessions at the historic 4.936km Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari, 45km south-west of Bologna.

The results mean that each side of the Pata Honda World Superbike garage has plenty of data analysis to go through this evening in order to allow each rider to improve his lap time.

Only the fastest ten combined times following tomorrow morning’s third Free Practice session will qualify automatically for the afternoon’s Superpole 2 that will determine final grid positions on the front four rows for Sunday’s two 19-lap races.

Sylvain Guintoli - P10, 1m49.296s

I’m a little disappointed with our position to be honest because we made some positive steps towards the end of the Assen weekend but we haven’t been able to translate them to the Imola track. I’m not getting the right feeling and I’m finding it quite hard to turn the bike. I can feel the front tyre compressing as I brake for the turns but I can’t get the right feeling with bike. We made some changes after this morning’s session and that helped a little, but we are still a long way off the front so there’s a lot of work to be done.

Michael van der Mark - P13, 1m49.651s 

It’s been a difficult day today because the bike is not yet working exactly how I want. I really like the track here and it feels like I’m fast but I’m having some problems in the braking area. We tried a lot of things to fix this because it is the main issue that we have but none of them really worked well. We will have to study everything very carefully tonight and try to find a new direction for tomorrow.

Pieter Breddels - technical co-ordinator 

We really expected to be a little closer to the front than we actually are and with Michael we ended up in 13th place which is for sure not where he is supposed to be. We have some problems stopping the machine and the changes we made helped on the exit but not so much on corner entry. We need to make a big step tomorrow and it’s a little bit the same with Sylvain. We moved towards last year’s setting, knowing that we were fast then, but that’s not really working; we need to work hard on coming up with a specific setting for him.