Points at Mallory Park for Samsung Superbike

Heavy rain at the ninth round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship at Mallory Park made for an extremely difficult weekend for the Samsung Suzuki Superbike team and rider Dean Thomas. Despite that he put in two solid rides to claim twelfth place in race one and fourteenth in race two. 

The grid was dictated by the rider’s Championship points due to the weather negating any on track action for most of Saturday. Therefore Thomas had to start from fifteenth on the grid and he had his work cut out passing riders on the intricate circuit.

“Considering how the weekend has been with everything that has happened, I’m happy to get points. We only had half an hour in the dry on track so we just rolled out with the setting we had and didn’t make any changes,” he said.  

After race one the team decided to make some changes to their set-up, “Race two we changed the front and it was better but the rear got worse and it was a tighter race, everyone was all bunched up. Then it got red flagged and that was that!”

Thomas was happy with how the latter part of race two went saying, “I’m reasonably happy as in the second half of the race I was running the same times as Lavilla. I started from fifteenth and I had a lot of traffic to try and get through so I shouldn’t complain really.”

His rib injury from Knockhill was still causing him some pain, “My ribs are not so bad, I was struggling on the last three to four laps before the red flag came out in race two. I had enough of a gap to keep going and I was hanging onto Harris but that was hard work. I’ll be fully recovered by Croft so I’m looking forward to that.”

The tenth round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship and the Metzler National Superstock Championship takes place at Croft on the 10-12th August.

The Samsung Superbike team would like to pass on their condolences to the Bridewell family and the Naturally Best team following the sad loss of Ollie Bridewell during the Mallory Park weekend.