Tom Sykes (Kawasaki Racing Team) heads into the opening round of the 2017 MOTUL FIM Superbike World Championship with very positive feeling aboard his Ninja machine, despite a disrupted final day of the test.

Securing the fourth fastest time out of the four sessions for the official test, the Yorkshireman’s time of 1.31.044 put him only 0.499s off his team-mate and fastest man Jonathan Rea’s time.

Giving his Kawasaki squad some work to do in order for him to be able to collect all the date he needed for his ZX-10RR, Sykes hails his team for their strong support and hard work.

“It was such a small crash but unfortunately I gave the guys a lot of work to do but I’m ready for the race weekend. I went out this morning and my first flying lap was on the money, I felt comfortable and from then on we started changing the bike. We had a small list of things to do and we really got some information today. In the second session we were playing catch up from my mistake in the first session so we lost a little bit of consistency. Ultimately we were able to make some changes, get some good information and now we’ll build on that and go into the race weekend stronger.

Phillip Island has never been good to me but hopefully we can turn that around and there’s going to be a great battle.”