Ducati’s Chaz Daves pipped Kawasaki’s Tom Sykes to a second successive pole position at Imola, with championship leader Jonathan Rea completing the front row.
Davies has been on fine form all weekend and wasted no time when qualifying got underway, the Welshman guiding his Panigale R to top spot on his initial run on race tyres.
Utilising clear track on his second run, Davies squeezed every ounce of available grip from his qualifying tyre to get close to his pole record from last year on his first lap with a 1m45.792s, and edged closer still on his final attempt with a 1m45.662s.
Sykes did put Davies’s second pole of 2017 under serious threat on his final lap, though the Kawasaki rider missed out by just 0.032s. Like in Assen, Rea failed to make his qualifying tyre last for two laps and languished a couple of tenths adrift in third.
MV Agusta’s Leon Camier has been enjoying a strong weekend so far, and carried that momentum forward into Saturday to secure his best qualifying result of the season in fourth. The Briton heads the second Aruba.it Ducati of Marco Melandri and Aprilia’s Eugene Laverty.
Barni Racing’s Xavi Fores will line up seventh on the grid, with Leandro Mercado an impressive eighth on the Ioda Aprilia. Yamaha’s Michael van der Mark brushed off an engine failure in FP3 to put his YZF-R1 ninth ahead of Lorenzo Savadori, who put the woes of a mystery issue on Friday behind him to progress through SP1 and complete the top 10.
Van der Mark’s team-mate Alex Lowes was a lowly 11th, with Stefan Bradl rounding out the top 12 on his Honda despite a big shunt in FP3 this morning.
The sister Honda of Nicky Hayden has endured a similarly nightmarish time of things at Imola so far, the American crashing on Friday and again in Saturday morning’s FP3. Not fazed by this, he pushed hard in the early stages of SP1 and sat second with a 1m48.698s.
A poor final effort left him exposed to the hard-charging Savadori and, indeed, the Italian shuffled Hayden down to 13th right at the death of SP1. Roman Ramos put on another impressive display for 14th, with Randy Krummenacher 15th.
Althea BMW’s Jordi Torres was a notable absentee from qualifying, the Spaniard sitting out SP1 due to illness. His participation in race one is unknown at the time of writing.
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