Points and pain at Mallory Park.
A tragedy and atrocious weather conditions made Mallory Park one of the most difficult race weekends for Dean Thomas and his Samsung Suzuki Superbike team. The grid was dictated by the rider’s Championship points due to the weather negating any on track action for most of Saturday. This left Thomas starting from fifteenth on the grid and finishing in twelfth in race one and fourteenth in race two.
“I was a lot faster in race two but finished two places further back, not sure how that works!” joked Thomas, “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.”
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. Not much to report really!”
Although the race was ended prematurely due to Jonathan Rea crashing and leaving debris on the track Thomas was happy with how the latter part of the race went, “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.
Thomas is still recovering from cracking his ribs at Knockhill and he is still finding them painful as he went on to day, “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.”
Dean would like to pass his condolences on to the Bridewell family and the Naturally Best team following the sad loss of Ollie Bridewell during the Mallory Park weekend.
The tenth round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship takes place at Croft on the 10
-12th August.
