Dean Thomas

Dean Thomas had a solid weekend at Silverstone aboard his Samsung Suzuki putting a difficult qualifying behind him to finish in fourteenth and thirteenth during the third round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship.

A crash during qualifying left Thomas to run his number two machine and when he was ready to got out on track on the second bike, the session was red flagged for a fallen rider

“Race one got off to a bit of a bad start, 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,” said Thomas, “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 go 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 we just didn’t get the breaks today to get forward. But we’ve got consistent laps on race tyres for the full twenty lap stint, we’ve made progress and it is a damn site better than Thruxton so that is the main thing!”

Race two was going better for Thomas but unfortunately it ended prematurely with a red flag at two thirds race distance. “It was a bit of a shame really as the Samsung Superbike was good and we were quite happy. Got a better start but I had a bit of an issue through turn two and three of 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.”

As well as racing in the Superbike class, Thomas is assisting a young rider in the Superstock class but he didn’t have the best of weekends, “That was a bit disastrous this weekend. I’m mentoring Joe Dickinson in Superstock through Revolution Ducati and it was a tough weekend for him. He split his exhaust pipe in the first qualifying and he was one of the unlucky ones who went down on the oil in the second one.” The bad run continued in the race as Thomas went onto say, “The Superstock race was a bit of a strange one, the guys only did seven laps and then there was the pace car for three and then they did two more laps of racing and then it was red flagged and that was it declared! He didn’t get much of a chance but move on, Jon Kirkham on the Samsung Ducati was in the same boat he didn’t get much of a chance either. With the pair of them they need to move on next week, chin up and see what happens.”

The next round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship is only a week away on the 5th – 7th May as Oulton Park, in the run up to the race Thomas will be keeping busy, “I’ve some work to do on the hospitality unit which I’m not looking forward to and really just preparation. I’ve got the guys a list of things to do for the bike but to be fair they are not a million miles away. Need to change a few little things and get a few things sorted like my leathers after my little tumble on Saturday and then roll onto Oulton Park,” he concluded.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Rider Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.