Dean Thomas

Snetterton has not been the luckiest of tracks for Dean Thomas in recent years and that bad luck continued during qualifying aboard his Samsung Suzuki.

His number one machine developed a technical problem during the single qualifying session as Thomas explains, “My number one bike had an oil leak and an engine problem of some kind. The black and orange flag came out for me to pull in and of course this happened as far away from the pits as possible!”

The Superbike class are now allowed to use just three tyres during qualifying and that rule hit Thomas hard today as well, “With the three tyre rule, which I’ve been caught with before, it was the same problem we had at Silverstone. We had to come back in and run another tyre which cut our qualifying tyres down to one. The second bike is just not as good as the number one machine so we just had a bad run,” he said.

The team still need to do some work to the number one bike as they are still slightly off the pace, “We need to make some changes to the number on bike because even when things are good we are still off the pace a bit. We are punching in 1min 7secs consistently but the guys are running in sixes so if we plan on running up the front tomorrow we need to find a good half a second a lap really but consistently for the whole twenty two laps. We’ve got some bright ideas so we will see what happens.”

It is shaping up to be a tough race with Thomas back in nineteenth place on the grid, “It seems to be getting harder every round, the field is closing up and the lap times I did here last year that had me up in the top ten, I’m not far off now and we are nineteenth. It is getting harder but we just need to find the setting with the bike and get a tyre that we know we can run race distance on and get he grip level we need on both sides,” he explained.

The grip issue is a problem but the team feel they can progress, “The right isn’t too bad but we have no grip from the left and we are turning into the left hand corners and losing the rear consistently so we need to make some changes to fix it but it is difficult. We are a bit behind schedule this weekend but we have some ideas for warm-up, if we find the half a second we need we will be running up where we should be, not at the front but where we should be in the field,” he concluded.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 9:19 am 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.