Sofuoglu and Giugliano provisional SBK poles in Moscow

The riders of the World Superbike and Supersport Championships have held the official practice sessions at the Moscow Raceway, with Sofuoglu being the provisional SSP pole sitter and Davide Giugliano the provisional SBK pole sitter.

By Gloria24 August 2012 · 2 min read

The World Superbike and Supersport Championship has returned to action with the first official practice sessions at the Moscow Raceway, with the Supersport riders leading the way, in a session that was somewhat eventful and red-flagged for quite some time.

At the start of the session, the morning’s dominant rider, Sam Lowes, went down at Turn 2, fortunately without physical consequences for him, while a little later Mulhauser crashed at Turn 3, with no consequences but a red flag, since one of the airbags was left deflated.

Once the affected area had been recovered, the action resumed, and just at that moment it was reported that there were raindrops in Sector 1, which caused most riders to return to the pits again, so there was little track activity for a few minutes.

Finally, they went back out and set lap times, especially Sofuoglu, who carried out a very interesting run of fast laps, managing to set a 1:37.875, the first 1:37 of the practice sessions so far. Meanwhile, Lowes was already placed behind him at 1:38.179, followed by Parkes in 3rd, Cluzel 4th, Leonov 5th, Talmacsi 6th, Foret 7th, Morais 8th, Debise 9th and Baldolini 10th. The work carried out by the Triumph man was very interesting.

In the Superbike Championship the fastest was Davide Giugliano, followed by Carlos Checa, so the Ducatis are working quite well at the Russian circuit. For the 34 the best lap was 1:35.074, and when we expected a drop to 1:34 it was ultimately not possible, since just as Checa was running those lap times he went into the gravel.

It was an interesting battle between teammates, although with star guests such as Melandri, Guintoli or Sykes, among others, so what happened in this first qualifying practice was interesting.

Behind Giugliano in 1st and Checa in 2nd came Guintoli 3rd, Melandri 4th, Davies 5th, Sykes 6th, Zanetti 7th, Aoyama 8th, Haslam 9th and Rea 10th. Meanwhile our representative David Salom finished in 19th position, step by step.

We also saw how the Aprilias took a very long time to get out on track; both Max Biaggi and Eugene Laverty had problems with their machines and lost a lot of time, finishing 13th and 17th respectively.