Team HRC on the up and up at Portimão

Team HRC have again hit the ground running in Portimão, continuing the recent positive trend with Leon Haslam placing third in FP2 and fourth overall on day 1, and Alvaro Bautista ninth, less than four tenths from his teammate.

Team HRC is in action at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve in Portugal, competing in round eleven of the Superbike World Championship, which follows immediately on the back of last weekend’s tenth round at Jerez de la Frontera in Spain and represents the final European event of the 2021 WorldSBK season.

Bautista and Haslam were out on a sunny track for the morning’s first free practice. Bautista made gradual progress throughout the 45-minute session as he and his technicians made adjustments to the race set-up of his CBR1000RR-R FIREBLADE, adapting it to suit the hard rear tyre specification that Alvaro will use in the races, his favourite softer solution not available at this round. Finishing with a fastest time of 1’42.246, he lay a positive seventh at the session’s end. Haslam worked well with his team early on, but a crash mid-session then caused him to lose valuable time, the Brit forced to remain in the garage for the rest of the practice. As a result, he finished fourteenth thanks to a time of 1’42.991 that he set at the start of the session.

Keen to make up for the time he lost during the morning, Leon was quick to improve on his earlier time in the afternoon’s second free practice. Despite the hotter conditions, he continued to up the pace as the session went on, before recording a fastest time of 1’41.716 in the final stages on a used rear tyre with which he rode for the entire session. This impressive lap time assured Haslam of fourth place in the combined standings at the end of day one. Alvaro was also able to lower his lap time by a fraction of a second to set a best of 1’42.115 during the second of the day’s sessions. This meant he closed in ninth position overall, just over six tenths off the provisional pole position time.