The opening action in the penultimate round of this year’s WorldSBK Championship ended with Sam Lowes close to the top six and with the promise of plenty more to come in the Portuguese round at Estoril

Lowes improved by over 0.6s in two practice sessions today and jumped five places up the leaderboard from 13th to eighth to end a bright and sunny first day in Estoril as the second fastest Independent Team rider

The Saturday action kicks off with FP3 at 9am local time ahead of Superpole two hours later, with day two completed by Race 1 at 2pm

/// SAM LOWES: 8th, 1:36.619, 31 LAPS

FP1 at Round 11 got underway with the Estoril track basking in glorious autumn sunshine that saw ambient temperature push over 25 degrees.

After a brief opening venture out on the 4.18km track, Lowes then completed an eight-lap second run before pitting to allow his Elf Marc VDS Racing crew to carry out modifications.

During that process, a technical issue was detected which unfortunately prevented Lowes from adding to his 11 laps in FP1 and he ended in 13th position with a best time of 1:37.294.

Keen to make up for lost time in FP2, Lowes needed just five laps in this afternoon’s session to dive inside his best time from this morning, and the 35-year-old ended the opening day eighth overall with personal best time of 1:36.619.

Despite missing out on some valuable track time to kick off today’s proceedings, Lowes was less than 0.3s away from the top three at the close of play with confidence high that he can be in the mix for the top five for the remainder of the weekend.

“I’ve got decent pace and it was a positive day”

“Estoril is a track that I don’t have a lot of experience at, so it took me a little bit of time to get up to speed. It was a pity we missed the second half of FP1 with a couple of niggling issues which broke my rhythm. But I was able to follow Alex at the beginning of FP2 to get some pointers as he is going well, so a big thanks to my brother. This afternoon I was able to run a decent pace and it turned out to be a positive day. I definitely need to improve in the last sector because that’s where I’m losing most of my time. In the first three splits I’ve got top six pace but in the last sector I’m quite a long way down the order and that is clearly something we need to figure out. If we can find a couple of tenths in T4 then we will be in the mix for the top five battle which is where we need to be.”