Jake Dixon didn’t enjoy the ideal qualifying session at the Grand Prix of the UK on Saturday and he faces a start from the middle of the 5th row while Filip Salac was 16th.

The rain that was forecast for Silverstone on Friday arrived early in the morning, which meant the 5.9km layout was damp but drying for FP2, with slicks the tyres of choice.

Even if there were spits of rain falling before Moto2 qualifying got underway at 14:45 local time, conditions remained dry with track temperatures rising to 28 degrees.

Jake Dixon, 13th – 2’03.838

The home hero was keen to get in as much track time as possible and ran throughout FP2 before setting the 3rd fastest time late on.

The Briton sat 6th on the provisional grid after the 1st run of flying laps in Q2. But Jake then made a mistake on his last flying lap. Some confusion meant he didn’t have enough time to get another lap in.

It meant the 29-year old was shuffled back to 13th in the order, with his best time 1.3s off Aron Canet’s pole lap.

“Qualifying was a bit of a disaster, to be fair. I thought we had two laps before pitting and would then have two more. But unfortunately, I slowed down too much after making a mistake on the first lap of my second run. It was my own mistake. Then I missed getting a final flying lap in by just a couple of seconds. I’m not massively pleased with the situation. It’s really frustrating as it’s going to make tomorrow quite hard work. But let’s keep focused, make sure we have the best bike possible tomorrow and see what we can do.”

Filip Salac, 16th – 2’04.291

Seeing how treacherous conditions were on Saturday morning, Filip opted against risking a great deal in FP2, and completed just 6 laps on his way to the 20th fastest time.

The Czech rider couldn’t feel comfortable in Q2 as he suffered from front chatter throughout, which hindered his turning capabilities through the track’s numerous fast changes of direction.

That meant the 23-year was unable to run the fastest times as he ended the session 16th and 1.8s off pole position.

“Well, it was a bad day for us. In the morning the track conditions were difficult so there was no chance to try anything because it was half wet-half dry. I just did a few laps to make sure the bike was running well. In qualifying I was struggling a lot to turn the bike from the very start. I also had a lot of front chatter. I don’t know why. I felt so bad on the bike today. I want to say sorry to the team but we need to make a big change on the bike to get some feeling back. I hope we’ll take a few points tomorrow. That’s the goal and with a few changes we’ll hopefully be able to enjoy it.”