Jordan Szoke was 17th quickest this morning at New Jersey Motorsport Park in the final practice for tomorrow’s two races in the MotoAmerica Superbike/Superstock category. Aboard his regular, Mopar CSBK Canadian National crown winning Mopar Express Lane/Joe Rocket/BMW Motorrad S1000RR, Szoke was again ninth quickest in the supporting Superstock section of the Feature class.
Next up for Brantford, ON based Szoke is the split SuperPole sessions, scheduled for mid-afternoon, when rain is expected at the New Jersey shore’s facility.
“My comfort level is getting there,” explained Szoke of the busy, 27 rider session. “The goal of comfort is to make things less work. We made some ride height changes to the chassis, and that helped make things easier to do physically.”
As Ohlins suspension guru Jon Cornwell made electronic adjustments to the wheelie control portion of the BMW, Szoke continued: “We also put in some new brakes, and it took me a few laps to get my head around that. Then I just needed a few clear laps, but that somehow didn’t work out!”
“Traffic was really bad for me that session, and the track is narrow in some sections, you have to be careful. I was out with Cameron (Beaubier, second quickest overall for Yamaha) in the middle of the session, and the Chris Fillmore (works KTM rider) crashed right in front of us. After that red flag, I was going to go out with Danny Eslick on that quick Aprilia, but then he had some kind of a mechanical problem.”
“Right now I’m not too concerned about our laps times, I just want to see what we can do with the bike; we haven’t played with the Traction Control feature much in Canada this year, our tracks are so point and shoot, but we’ll see what we can come up with.”
While unwilling to speculate about possible weather conditions, most of the regular MotoAmerica racers expect Szoke to do well if it is wet for final qualifying in the two SuperPoles sessions.
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