Elf Marc VDS Racing Team rider Sam Lowes was in impressive form on the opening day of practice at the Czech WorldSBK round to finish second fastest behind reigning World Champion Toprak Razgatlioglu

Lowes enjoyed a fantastic Friday at the 4.21km Most track to lap close to the top three in FP1 before he shone in cool, cloudy and windy conditions in FP2 to finish lead Ducati and top Independent Team rider in second.

With his weekend off to such a positive start, Lowes is confident he’ll be in the hunt for the top three in Superpole at 11am local time tomorrow followed by Race 1 over 22 laps at 2pm

/// SAM LOWES: 2ND, 1:31.542, 38 LAPS

After a damp start to proceedings, the Most track was sufficiently dry for Lowes to start the action in round five on Pirelli’s slick rubber, although it was difficult to build into a fast rhythm with an incident-packed FP1 session red flagged multiple times.

Overnight rain and cold temperatures of just 13 degrees were clearly having an impact on grip levels, but a measured approach from Lowes saw him set the fourth fastest time with a 1:32.506.

FP1 ended with the Briton just 0.026s away from the top three and he was immediately in contention for the top places when the afternoon action commenced in slightly colder conditions of 12 degrees as a strong and cooling wind buffeted Most.

The 34-year-old led the way for the opening 13 minutes and he made constant improvements to eventually lap over a second faster compared to FP1 with a best time of 1:31.542.

That fast pace saw Lowes finish just four tenths-of-a-second away from Most’s race record and he was only 0.2s behind Razgatlioglu at the end of play.

“Second on day one is a big positive”

“With the weather being a bit hit and miss all day it meant this morning’s FP1 was quite a strange session. We were quite lucky to get the chance to complete a good number of laps in some decent conditions, but it was hard to get into a flow with all the red flags. This afternoon it was a much better session with better track conditions. I felt good on the bike, but it is clear we need to find a step in the second sector. We’d hoped to do a long run in FP2, but I stopped to make some changes because I didn’t have the feeling I was expecting. But when we went back out on the same set of tyres I felt much better, so the positive point is the changes we made clearly worked. I think we can make another step overnight and to finish second on the first day has to be viewed as a positive and I feel good for tomorrow.”