Tom Sykes and Jonathan Rea were second and third fastest respectively on Day 1 in Imola, with 2013 Champion Sykes hampered by some issues but reigning Champion Rea happy to get dry track time.

Sykes did improve his previous morning session best time with a 1’47.347 in the afternoon, despite problems with the rear brake for the Yorkshireman, and ended the session just under a tenth of a second quicker than Jonathan Rea’s fastest lap of the day. Sykes couldn’t get a planned long run/race simulation completed, but is confident that his machine set-up is already good, with just some final adjustments to be done in Saturday’s short third practice session.

 With more track time available to him on Friday, Rea completed a long run and will now make some small adjustments before Tissot-Superpole on Saturday, which will be followed shortly afterwards by the first race of the weekend.

“It was good to get second place in the time sheets, even though we had two problems with the rear brake,” said Sykes. “This also disturbed our pace but we have potential and for this I am happy. When I had the issue in the second run I was a little bit nervous but we still improved our lap time. I am happy with that. Overall I wanted to put a long run together but I think the bike is quote close to where we wanted to be. This is something positive. To improve the lap time in the afternoon session means that, all things considered, we have to be happy that we are second fastest. Chaz Davies has been unbelievably fast so we need to pay attention to that and see if tomorrow we can improve the bike a little bit over distance. I feel we are close enough to start race one now.”

 “We did a long run and we are working step-by-step this weekend, not making too many massive changes,” explained Rea. “We have been concentrating on electronics with Paolo. Both Paolo and Danilo, the other electronics engineer, have worked really strongly to give us a good engine brake strategy that we are developing. Today felt like a lot of testing had been done, so to put a race simulation on top of that gives a lot of information to help fine tune things. It looks like we can improve even further with that information and I am quite happy. I feel I have a got good rhythm and tomorrow is the big job. I felt like we ticked the boxes and we tried two options of race tyres. For me I feel quite clear that one of them will work better. It has been a good day and we really needed the track to be dry. I am making good progress and there are quite a few areas where we feel we can improve. Today we learned a lot.”

The KRT duo are back on track at 8:45am local time (GMT +2) on Saturday 30^th of April for the last 15 minutes of practice ahead of Tissot-Superpole at Imola.