Mixed results for Samsung Superbike team at Silverstone.
The Samsung Superbike team had mixed fortunes at Silverstone with Dean Thomas on the Suzuki Superbike pulling in two point scoring results in the Bennetts British Superbike Championship. His Ducati Superstock team-mate Jon Kirkham was forced to start from the back of the grid for the Metzeler National Superstock race, due to a technical infringement.
Thomas had an eventful qualifying when he crashed and damaged his number one machine. He made it back to the pits to pick up his second bike but unfortunately the red flag came out and halted his progress. This left him in fifteenth place on the grid.
Race one got off to a bad start with a clutch problem, “We’ve had a few problems with clutches over the last few weeks and we went on the cautious side and made sure we had plenty of free play in the lever. I put it into gear and it just started going forward before I even needed it to, and I’m frantically trying to stop the thing. I’m thinking “Here we got jump start penalty, ride through that’s it.” I just had a bad run I think I was twenty odd by the time I got off the line and by the time I worked my way through I was fourteenth which is not so bad but it is not quite where we want to be. We need to be running round the tenth mark and we have got the lap times to do that,” explained Thomas.
He finished race one in fourteenth place and bettered that in race two with a thirteenth, “Got a better start but I had a bit of an issue through turn two and three off the first lap. Cal Crutchlow had gone off across the grass and come back on track and he sort of dropped right into the middle of us all so I lost a couple of places amongst all that. But I was sitting comfortably in behind Karl Harris and the Bridewells and just waiting until a few laps from the end because I knew their tyres would wear out quicker than mine. I ran quite a hard compound rear and then the red flag came out and that was it. Cut short but thirteenth and fourteenth are point scoring races and it was better than Thruxton and who knows what will happened next week,” he smiled.
Kirkham on the Samsung Ducati completed first qualifying in a healthy sixteenth place and followed that up with an eighteenth in second qualifying placing him in seventeenth on the grid. However, due to the problems the team had at Thruxton, Ducati gave them the use of another machine which unbeknownst to the team had a technical infringement. This was picked up on at scrutineering and Kirkham’s times were disallowed forcing him to start from fortieth place on the very back of the grid.
“Things were going well until my times were taken away. Being fortieth on the grid left me with a lot of work to do. Unfortunately the pace car came out after just five laps so I couldn’t make any more progress. I had managed to get up to twenty fourth in those five laps, but once the pace car went in we only raced for two more laps and it was red flagged again. The race wasn’t really long enough for me to have made an impact.” he said.
“I’m disappointed to have only had five laps of race time, all the work all weekend just for that. We are having some work done on our engines before going to Oulton Park and the Ducati should go well there,” he concluded.
The fourth round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship and the Metzeler National Superstock Championship will take place at Oulton Park on the 5th – 7th May with race day on the Bank Holiday Monday.
Dean Thomas - Silverstone
Jon Kirkham - Silverstone
