Championship contender Leon Haslam struggled to find grip with his qualifying tyres resulting in his worst qualifying performance of the season.  The young Briton will have to dig deep tomorrow starting from 14^th place on the grid for both races.

“I am very disappointed with how things went today and I’m not pleased to finish 14th – the first time I’ve been out of the top five and my worst result in qualifying this year. Today we had similar problems to yesterday and we didn’t manage to solve those problems so that’s why we are where we are,” said Haslam.

“I’m having a lot of problems with lack of grip – especially on qualifying tyres. My times on race rubber are pretty good, but once I put on the qualifiers we seem to run into trouble.”

The Alstare team have one more chance in tomorrow morning’s warmup session to solve their problems.

“My grid position is going to make the races very difficult, but ahead of that we have to solve the problem. We’ll have a look at all the data and talk to the telemetry boys and see if there are some pointers. Then, we’ll have to see if the changes we make in the warm-up improve the bike. It’s going to be a very long, hot and difficult day tomorrow, but my aim is to make two good starts and fight as hard as I can,” said Haslam.

Haslam’s teammate, Sylvain Guintoli, had a better day making it through to the Superpole 3 qualifying session. The Frenchman missing out on a front row grid spot, but recorded the fifth fastest lap and will start tomorrow’s pair of 20-lap races from the second row of the grid.

“I am definitely very happy to have got into Superpole 3, but a little bit disappointed not to have got a place on the front row of the grid. It was very, very close and it’s a shame, but after yesterday I am so happy with the big improvement we made today,” said Guintoli.

“The track is definitely coming in now and it’s so much better than yesterday. The bike felt good and strong and I really enjoyed Superpole today. We hardly changed anything from yesterday except the gearbox and the engine characteristics. The top speed was better today and I was also able to go through the corners faster.”

“I think that the biggest change today was the track’s grip level. It seems that when there is little or no track grip, we really struggle. Considering how we ended yesterday, I think the team has done a great job and I’m really looking forward to the races tomorrow.”