The penultimate round of the world Supersport series was held in southern Spain at the circuit of Jerez.
This was a track Luke had ridden before, all be it just for one day on his Honda before the season started.
 
Fridays practice sessions saw Stapleford get to grips with the circuit and make a few changes to the bike.  These worked well for him as he improved his FP1 time by 0.6 of a second ending Friday in 17^thposition. The team knew there was still work to be done to qualify well.
Free practice three was very similar to the previous session ending in 17^th once more meaning it was a trip to Superpole 1 for qualifying.Although Luke would have liked to have been hire up the grid, the time that he posted in qualifying was over a second faster than he had ever been around the circuit meaning in hindsight qualifying was a strong session for the team.  The time of 1:44.877 would place him in 15^th on the grid.
 
Race day, Luke ended the morning warm up session in 12^th place, which was a positive sign heading into the 19 lap race.
 
A good jump off the fifth row looked to set things up for a good race, however in the opening couple of corners Luke got bumped down the field and would cross the line on the opening lap down in 19^thposition and with a lot of work to do to get back into a point paying position.  Luke got his head down and started to settle into a rhythm and was picking off a few places.  By the halfway point he was back up into 15^th. By this time the filed was spreading out and he faced a four second gap up to the next group.  Then in the dying stages of the race Luke gained another position giving him 14^th and securing two more World Championship points.

Luke Stapleford: "Overall it was a difficult weekend, I'd hoped to be well inside the top 10 throughout the meeting but we just didn't manage to hit the sweet spot with the bike. There were some positives to take firstly we had a complete dry weekend and secondly we've highlighted a couple of issues which are preventing us from moving forward. Its kind of a relief knowing we have issues to solve and that our current pace is far from our maximum, had we have come away from the weekend in P14 but having felt we performed as strongly as we possibly could then we'd be very worried but we know we're capable of being right at the sharp end and we won't stop until that goal has been achieved. Now we have just over a week to come up with some ideas to try and rectify those issue so that we can finish the season off on a high at yet another new circuit in Qatar. Thanks to everybody who plays a part in getting us to the grid no matter how small it's really appreciated and hopefully in a couple of weeks time we'll have finished the season off on a high and be ready to come out fighting at the start of 2017."

Luke being the perfectionist that he is, is never going to be happy until he is fighting at the front of the field, but taking in consideration this is another relatively new track, we made a lot of changes to the bike 14^th is a good result and we now head to the season finale in Qatar, to end the season on a high.