Reigning World Superbike champion Tom Sykes has left Portimao in a happy mood.
The Kawasaki Racing Team rider has been testing in Portugal before the summer break in track action begins in earnest.
With the season not restarting until early September, this was the last chance in 2014 for the team to make larger set-up and technical developments before the final four rounds of races begin again at Jerez in Spain.
Using race tyres only, Sykes set the best lap time of the tests with a 1 minute 42.719 seconds.
“On day one we put in 70 laps and we started some good work on some things,” said Sykes.
“We have played with the geometry of the bike, and other things you cannot really do on a race weekend.
“The plan on day two was to go more in depth with some items but we had some issues and were not able to fully complete our test schedule.
“I only used one tyre on the final day and when we got back out on the track later on the day we still did competitive times on it at the end.
“So we have improved the bike again on used tyres.
“We still had some things to test, and it is not a big issue, but it would have been nice to have fine-tuned the bike even more.
“We ended up with a good lap time on day two. The bigger picture is that we can still go racing competitively and we feel we have improved the bike again during this test.”
Click here to take you back to more Sports news.
Want to read, watch and hear more? You can download the FREE Examiner Apple App here, the FREE Examiner Android App here or you can view the paper as an e-edition on your Apple, Android or Kindle device by clicking here
To follow us on Twitter click here
