MUGGAS SIXTH FASTEST

Winston Ten Kate Honda's Karl Muggeridge set the sixths fastest time in today's first qualifying session at the new Silverstone circuit in UK at round five of the World Superbike Championship.

This years World Superbike round at Silverstone will be hold on the shorter international circuit (3'561 meters instead of 5'036) which is also being used in the British Superbike Championship.

Muggas who really loved the longer faster track was first a bit disappointed about this decision but as he says the conditions are the same for everybody.

In the morning Muggas and his squad tried all kind of different suspension settings to get the CBR 1000 handling a bit better around the twisty track and also made some good improvement on the breaks.

Muggas comments: "The new track is the same for everybody so it's the same challenge for everyone to get the bike handle around here and get the grip down; although I definitely preferred the old one. In the morning we tried out a lot of different things from rear suspension and forks to different brake pads and disks so we had a lot of information for this afternoon and we got a pretty good bike out of that but we still have a bit of work to do to get the best pieces together. Also we aren't quite sure yet with the tyre selection as we concentrated more on the suspension settings."

The first qualifying session was led by the Ducati riders Laconi and Toseland followed closely by Corona Alstares Suzukis with Corser and Kagayama

THIRD ROW ON THE GRID FOR MUGGERIDGE

2nd Qualifying
Winston Ten Kate rider Karl Muggeridge qualified in tenth position for this afternoon's Superpole event. During an incredible windy but dry morning qualifying session he tried out a few different tyres and tried to smoothen out the race settings. Today's gusty winds made the handling problem they have even worse, but there's still a few things to be tested in the afternoon free practice.

Karl comments:

"The bike is handling ok but not good enough. We keep chipping away and we have some transforming to do this afternoon before Superpole, but I'm confident we can sort it out for then."

Superpole:
Today's Superpole didn't stand under the lucky star for the Winston Ten Kate team, Muggas lost one position to his qualifying time and will start tomorrow's 28 lap race from 3rd row of the grid where as his team mate Vermeulen lost four position from is provisional front row start and moved back to 5th on the second row of the grid.

The team has worked hard to find some better settings for the CBR 1000 to get it around a bit more stable for tomorrow's two races, but hasn't quite found yet the best way. Muggeridge has been able to improve his race lap time by four tenth but so did everybody else and unfortunately the time on the soft tyre did stay the same. So it looks like there will be some late night working in the Winston Ten Kate box tonight!

Muggas comments: "We changed a lot this afternoon again, but I'm not quite convinced yet. The bike seems to feel a little bit better but I'm really still struggling with grip. Superpole was a bit like a lottery for everybody out there with those gusty winds, they made a bit of a difference to the lap times whatever direction they came from. Not quite sure yet what we are going to do with the settings I think best is I have a sleep over it... - we'll see what tomorrow brings!"

MUGGAS TAKES TWO TENTH PLACES

Race 1:
Karl Muggeridge finished in tenth place in race one of the fifth round of the World Superbike championship at Silverstone.

Muggas got a pretty good start and made up a few places on the first lap but couldn't keep the pace of the front group mainly due to grip problems and therefore slowly got shuffled back to tenths position.

Muggas comments: "I was pretty happy with the start but that alone doesn't win you a race. We got the steering of the bike improved but lost the grip again, it's just out of balance and we struggling to find the right direction. As that wasn't enough problems about two thirds of the race the bike developed an ignition problem which meant it didn't rev as high as it should. I lost some top speed and couldn't do anything about getting passed by a couple of other riders, which was pretty frustrating.  

Frenchman Laconi took his first victory of this season with six times winner Corser in second and last years World Champion James Toseland in third. Muggeridge's team-mate Vermeulen finished in fourth position and was able to close the gap to second in the championship down to 8 points.

Race 2:
Karl Muggeridge, repeated his performance of the first race and finished again in tenth position in the second race here in Silverstone at round five of the World Superbike Championship.

Muggas seems to have sorted his start problems he used to have the last couple of rounds and got away pretty good again making four positions into the first corner. The bike felt pretty good for the first third of the race and enabled Karl to hold 7 position for a few laps until ge started getting grip problems on the rear again and had to be happy with bringing home another 10^th place.

Muggas comments: "We made some changes after race one and the bike was definitely feeling a bit better. But around ten laps before the end, the grip at the rear just seemed to drop off - especially at the hairpin and again coming out of the chicane. It made changing direction pretty difficult but the bike was holding a better line through the faster sections. For sure, the results are disappointing after the progress we made at Monza but there's a long way to go, a lot still to learn and I'm looking forward to testing some new parts in Magny Cours to improve on what we learnt this weekend.."

Ronald ten Kate - team manager:"I have to admit that our results today have not met the expectations we had following our performances in Monza. It looks like the handling of the bike in first few laps of the race is causing us some problems but hopefully we can look at that when we go testing at Magny Cours in France next week. We have a lot of new parts to test there and this will be our first real opportunity to try things outside a race weekend. We're looking to improve the bike in a few areas and hopefully put the two riders into winning positions. We need to change some things quickly to get back to our winning ways but there are still 14 races left and a lot of points up for grabs."