A crazy qualifying session was staged on the Cremona track, the scene of a Superpole round that gave repetitive twists between falls, yellow flags and resounding surprises. At the end of a heart-pounding session, Iker Lecuona took pole position, author of a personal record lap that gives the Spanish rider the best grid position of his career in the Superbike World Championship.
A pole as unexpected as it is deserved, coming at the end of twenty minutes of real chaos on the track. Numerous riders ended up on the ground during the timed attempts, forcing the race management to repeatedly display yellow flags that complicated the plans of several teams, preventing clean laps at the decisive moments of the session.
The most illustrious victim of this situation was undoubtedly Nicolò Bulega, who found himself resoundingly without a valid time until four minutes after the end of qualifying. The Ducati rider, one of the great favourites of the weekend, had to wait until his last breath to take second place, still giving himself a front row that seemed far from obvious just a few moments before.
To complete the provisional podium of the Superpole, Yari Montella thought of it… in fact, the third half went to Andrea Surra, another name that rarely appears at the top of qualifying, testifying to how much the session was conditioned by interruptions and the difficulty of finding the right window to complete a clean lap.
Fourth time for Sam Lowes, followed by Yari Montella and Andrea Baldassarri, who complete a particularly unusual top six compared to the usual hierarchies of the championship. Delayed Michael Rinaldi Bassani, thirteenth, while the position of Alvaro Bautista, only sixteenth at the end of the session, is particularly surprising.
A result, that of the Spaniard, which complicates the plans of the official Ducati team in view of tomorrow’s races, considering how starting far from the front rows can represent a major obstacle on a circuit where overtaking is not always easy. Even further back is Danilo Petrucci, who will only start from the nineteenth box, a placement that weighs heavily on the ambitions of the home rider.
The starting grid that comes out of it, therefore, appears completely revolutionized compared to the forecasts of the eve. Cremona thus offers an unprecedented and unpredictable scenario, with Lecuona called to defend a historic pole in race-1, while the big names of the championship will have to work hard to climb up positions and try to limit the damage in general classification.
It remains to be seen if the hierarchy on the dry lap will also find confirmation in the race, or if the race pace will reward the usually more constant riders, penalized today by a qualifying session that has upset every prediction.
Written by Fabio Averna
Article produced by the AiSportNews newsroom with the support of artificial intelligence tools.