Sykes to carry forward successful Aragon test momentum

For Tom Sykes the second half of the season comes laden with opportunity, starting with a circuit at which he has just completed a successful test - Motorland Aragon. The Spanish track will play host to a Superbike World Championship round for the second time when action gets underway on Friday but the circuit is already a preferred testing venue for many teams, including Kawasaki Racing Team's official squad.

A planned two-day test for Sykes and team-mate Loris Baz last week turned into three days, to make up for an opening session lost to rain. Sykes, currently third in the championship, found improvements to his race distance set-ups and fully intends to put them to good use on raceday on Sunday.

Sykes has been a race winner in 2012 already, taking victory at Monza. At Motorland Aragon, he is keen to get back to winning ways and peg back both the current championship leader Max Biaggi and second place rider Jonathan Rea.

Tom Sykes: "Aragon has a great track layout, one that I really enjoy riding on. We go there on the back of a test that we did there last week. It was very positive and unofficially it seems we were the fastest there. If we can carry that on into this and weekend I will be happy. We did a lot of laps in testing and I am confident we have closed the gap on the leader. All the testing we did at Aragon was definitely worthwhile and we confirmed two main things, each of which should make a difference to performance. It was good to focus our minds on the job in hand and make some real progress."