Spies takes provisional pole

By John Hopkins

Ben Spies claimed the provisional pole position for this weekend's pair of AMA Superbike races at Virginia International Raceway on Friday.

The Yoshimura Suzuki rider and current series points leader turned a lap at 1:23.934 on his GSX-R1000 as rain clouds started to loom over the VIR circuit. Should he hold on to the pole through Saturday morning's final session Spies would add another point to the Superbike championship lead.

Spies comes into this weekend with a 27-point lead on Mat Mladin and five races left in the season.

His teammate and chief title rival Mladin was second quickest at 1:24.477 and Jason DiSalvo placed third with a time of 1:24.992 aboard his factory Yamaha YZF-R1.

"For me, it's about race wins and poles," Spies said on amasuperbike.com. "Every time you can score a point, that's what you need to be doing. It's hard to concentrate on just poles or just race wins. Every point is going to matter now, just like last year.

"And right when I was starting to come in off the old tire I saw that big cloud coming in and I was thinking if it rains hard the track in the morning could be a bit different, better or worse, but definitely different. So we decided to put in a decent lap -- it wasn't stellar -- and we followed it up with a few pretty quick laps."

Jamie Hacking completes the provisional front row on his Kawasaki ZX-10R after recording a time of 1:25.182.

Montreal's Miguel Duhamel was eighth fastest with a time of 1:25.869 and Calgary rider Chris Peris set the 12th fastest time of 1:26.891 on a Suzuki GSX-R1000.