Mike Jones tops FP1 at Morgan Park ASBK

By Trevor Hedge

Chas Hern was the first Superbike rider to head out on the track at 1140 this morning for the first of today’s three 25-minute practice sessions for the second round of the YMF Loan 2015 ASBK Championship at Morgan Park.

Sunny skies and a mild breeze were the virtually perfect weather conditions that greeted riders as many of them negotiated the 3km Morgan Park Raceway layout for the first time.

As riders started to build speed it was clearly obvious from my single isolated infield vantage point, near the penultimate turn, that Mike Jones was visibly the fastest man on the circuit. I didn’t need any timing screen to tell me that. Likewise, as the session progressed I could also see that James Mutton was starting to get down to some pace and a cautious Daniel Falzon was slowly working up a head of steam in his Superbike debut.

On returning to the pits from my photo point, courtesy of a lift from one of the Racesafe cars (thanks boys), I headed into the timing centre for confirmation of my visual virtual stopwatch only to find that the normally eminently reliable Computime systems had experienced some malfunction. Thus the times below are almost certainly far from correct, but it is the best information we have to hand at present. There is a fair amount of manual work required by the Computime staff to recover and assess all the data before arriving at a verifiable set of results. Computime have told us that it will be ‘at least’ an hour before the timing data from FP1 can be fully recalculated.

ASBK Superbikes will be out on track again we estimate around 2pm. The schedule currently around an hour behind due to some track maintenance undertaken between the Supersport and Superbike sessions.

Superbikes have two 30-minute qualifying sessions tomorrow before a Top Ten Superpole session scheduled for 1515 Saturday afternoon.

The first Superbike race of the weekend is scheduled to take place at 1130 Sunday morning. The second and final 14-lap race is slated to get underway at 1445 Sunday afternoon.

Chris Quinn topped the first Supersport session ahead of Kane Burns and Troy Guenther.

Callum Barker headed Brian Houghton and Locky Taylor in the Moto3 ranks where the top eight were all Honda NSF 250 mounted.

Mick Gordon topped the Formula 3 session ahead of Michael Pillinger, both riders onboard SV650 Suzuki machinery.