The first benchmark in the 2025 Bridgestone Canadian Superbike Championship season was set by Alex Dumas on Friday, as the former champion paced the GP Bikes Pro Superbike class in morning practice at Shannonville Motorsport Park.
For the first time ever, the overhauled P1 session would offer an automatic entry to Q2 for the top-five finishers on Friday, sending the rest of the field to compete in Q1 later this afternoon for the final five spots in the top-ten Q2 shootout.
Dumas jumped to the top of the leaderboard almost right away to begin the 40-minute P1 session, looking extremely comfortable aboard his new Economy Lube BMW as he quickly entered the 1:04 lap time range.
Sam Guerin was the only early challenger for Dumas, trailing by just over 0.3 seconds while the rest of the field was over a full second behind the leader, perhaps easing into the conditions after a rainy morning at SMP.
Those gaps would begin to shrink around the midway point, however, as Jordan Szoke dislodged the EFC Group BMW of Guerin to move into second place aboard his CKM Kawasaki.
That lap also dragged teenager Philip DeGama-Blanchet into the top five as he used 14-time champion Szoke as a reference ahead of him, with the 17-year-old looking to play spoiler and snag an automatic entry to Q2.
Reigning champion Ben Young was one name on the fringe after DeGama-Blanchet’s early time attack, but concerns of a Q1 visit were quickly squashed by the new Honda rider as he pushed his Van Dolder’s Home Team machine into a more comfortable fourth.
Young would add one more flying lap in the final minute for good measure, climbing to second in the final order and only 0.315 seconds behind rival Dumas, bumping Szoke and Guerin down a place with just 0.392 seconds covering the top four.
That would be as close as anyone would get to Dumas though, with the 2021 champion topping the first session of the day despite a late crash entering turn 12, giving his team some work to do before he returns to chase BS Battery pole in Q2.
Fellow Honda star David MacKay would then become the rider in jeopardy in fifth, but MacKay managed to piece together a pair of strong laps to secure the last automatic entry to Q2 for the ODH/Snow City Cycle team, leaving DeGama-Blanchet sixth and Connor Campbell a close seventh for B&T MacFarlane Kawasaki.
The results mean Dumas, Young, Szoke, Guerin, and MacKay will bypass Q1 on Friday afternoon, with DeGama-Blanchet and Campbell hoping to be two of the five names who join them later on as the rest of the 24-rider field battles for spots in Q2.
The first half of the qualifying period is scheduled to get underway at 2:10 pm ET in Shannonville, before Q2 kicks off immediately after at roughly 2:40 pm ET.
The full weekend schedule and results can be found on the series’ official website.
