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Yakhnich Yamaha's Sam Lowes will start the opening round of the 2013 World Supersport Championship at Phillip Island from pole position after no rider could get close to his stunning record-breaking benchmark from Q1.
Already commanding a lead of more than a second over Kenan Sofuoglu courtesy of his 1min 32.545secs effort in Friday's Q1 session, Lowes could afford to relax heading into Q2. Indeed, with Sofuoglu only improving his lap time to 1min 33.157secs, Lowes would retain a comfortable six tenth margin over the Turk.
Though he couldn't replicate his Q1 form, Lowes was still the fastest rider in the Q2 session itself with a time of 1min 32.779secs, ahead of Sofuoglu, Fabien Foret and Michael van der Mark, who in turn rose to third and fourth on the overall timesheets.
Behind them, British Supersport runner-up Jack Kennedy will start his first WSS race from an impressive fifth position on the little fancied Riva Moto Honda, while David Salom shrugged off the bruises of a painful FP1 crash to vault himself up to sixth on the Intermoto Kawasaki.
With improvements proving fairly limited across the field, Roberto Rolfo's Q1 effort was good enough to put the new ParkinGO MV Agusta
F3 a fine seventh ahead of its much anticipated series debut, ahead of Andrea Antonelli on the Go Eleven Kawasaki, British rider Kev Coghlan on the DMC Lorenzini Kawasaki and Lorenzo Zanetti on the Pata Honda.
Just missing out on a top ten start for his WSS debut, Christian Iddon qualified a respectable 13th place on the second of the MV Agustas, just behind the Yamahas of Massimo Roccoli and Vladimir Leonov.
Elsewhere, wild-card riders Kevin Curtain and Josh Hook will start 14th and 22nd respectively, while the return of Suzuki machinery to the WSS grid will see Roberto Tamburini start 23rd and Mathew Scholtz in 25th.
However, there was less joy for regular front runners PTR Honda, whose best representative David Linortner could only manage 17th on the grid. Lead rider Sheridan Morais did, however, get some laps in to qualify 24th, the South African having suffered a myriad of technical issues that have prevented him from barely completing a lap since pre-season testing.