Dean Thomas

Dean Thomas and his Samsung Suzuki took to the Brands Hatch Indy circuit for the last qualifying session of the Bennetts British Superbike 2007 season. He completed the singular session in fourteenth place

Things were not going too well in free practice but they started to come right in qualifying as he explained, “Qualifying went pretty well actually considering how much we are struggling. We’ve been a little off the pace and struggling with rear grip. We have a rear grip issue and a chatter issue which we worked on all day Friday and all of this morning trying to get rid of. We went into qualifying and put some qualifying tyres on and it cured all our problems in one hit! So that proves that it is a rear grip issue that we are dealing with.”

Now that they have proved what the problem is they feel there is no need to change the bike, “We’re not going to mess around with the bike now, we are going to leave it and go back to Dunlop to see if we can cure the problem that way, with a different construction tyre.”

Although fourteenth has turned into Thomas’ regular position he was still happy with the out come, “We’ve qualified well, we are in fourteenth which is where we usually are. I’m less than a tenth off Walker and the guys I should be battling with really, so overall it is quite good. The down side is we are still not there with the race tyres, which if we can’t cure that for tomorrow then it will be a tough day.”

The Brands Hatch Indy circuit isn’t a favourite of a lot of riders but Thomas doesn’t mind it as he went on to say, “I like it here; it isn’t a bad little circuit. I love the full circuit, I’m not super keen on the small one but as the years have ticked over I have grown to like it. I had a good qualifying here last year when I was on the Hawk bike and pretty good races considering the bike was new at that stage. We’ve done reasonably well today. I’m just hoping we can have a decent result as it will mean quite a few things to me to be in the top fifteen.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 6:49 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.