Dean Thomas

The Samsung Suzuki team had a race day to forget at Donington Park with Dean Thomas having to pull out of race one with a blown engine. Due to his team-mate Sean Emmett having similar issues over the weekend, the team didn’t have any engines left for race two which therefore saw Thomas side lined.

“It was disastrous really,” sighed Thomas, “We have been struggling all weekend but race one the engine blew up. I think it has run a crank or something like that. My team-mate Sean Emmett had trouble yesterday, he did one yesterday morning and did one again in qualifying which is unusual as we don’t have any blow ups normally. That ran us down to zero engines apart for the one I had and I did that in the first race. So that was it all our engines gone, we were lucky enough to be lent one by NB Racing and we wrecked it as well!”

It is very unusual to have this kind of a failure let alone several in one weekend as Thomas highlighted, “It is so unusual it doesn’t make any sense. The guys have looked at it and been through all the data and tried to work out what is wrong but for some reason all we can think of is an oil starvation. Must be to do with it being on its side for a long periods of time, we did have a problem with one other race track where we knew we had to run a little bit more oil but we weren’t told to do so here so that might be the case. The engines are being sent off to be rebuilt to get them up and running and ready for Brands.”

Following a tough weekend like this Thomas is in the process of regrouping and getting ready for the final round at Brands Hatch. “I know it is getting towards the end of the season and we are not fighting for a championship but we are still doing our best and all the guys in the workshop and Samsung and everybody else that is involved with the race team, work hard to make sure that we do the best we can. It is disappointing really, this is the first time ever that I can think of in my racing career where I’ve spent the second race sitting in hospitality with the guests!” he said joking about the unusual situation.

“Roll on Brands Hatch and hopefully, fingers crossed we won’t have this problem and Sean and I will be somewhere where we should be. Stuck in the top ten bracket hopefully and get a decent result to finish the year off,” he concluded.

The final round of the Bennett British Superbike Championship takes place at Brands Hatch on the 12th – 14th October.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Rider Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.