Dean Thomas

Qualifying for the ninth round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship at Mallory Park in Leicestershire has been cancelled due to standing water at the side of the 1.41-mile circuit. Click here for info and revised timetable.

The organisers of the ninth round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship at Mallory Park have rescheduled all of the practice and qualifying sessions into Saturday, with racing on Sunday, following the suspension of activities on Friday afternoon due to torrential rain.

The first free practice for the Superbikes had been stopped when Ollie Bridewell crashed at the Esses and despite the best endeavours of the BSB Medical team succumbed, while being treated in the circuit medical centre, to the critical head and neck injuries he had sustained in the incident.

Our sympathies and thoughts are with Ollie’s family, friends and team.

Dean Thomas has once again had to sit on the side lines due to the cracked ribs he picked up at Knockhill. He took part in the first two free practice sessions which were held in wet conditions but as soon as he was faced with dry track time it became apparent that his injury was still an issue. He has passed his Samsung Suzuki over to his team-mate Sean Emmett. “I went out in the rain and that was fine, I could do all the laps I needed to do. I went out in the dry for six or seven laps and my ribs were playing up, it has only been two weeks since I cracked them so I think they are just not ready. It is a bit of a shame really because I was hoping to move forward this weekend and Oulton Park is one of my favourite tracks, we have a good tyre allocation from Dunlop and all the good things. I won’t live up to what we need which is not good,” he explained, “Even though they are predicting rain for tomorrow, if it rained “Yes” I could ride but if it dries then there is no way I’ll last twenty laps. I had no option really but to step back and let Sean ride the bike really. He is pleased but what could I do!”

With back to back race weekends he is now in a race to be fit for round nine of the Championship at Mallory Park in just one week’s time. “I hope I am fit. I thought I’d be ok for here to be honest. Friday I didn’t really go forward at the pace I was going the other week. I thought I should be alright and yesterday I had a few aches and then when I got out there in the dry it was a damn sight worse, so who knows. I’m hoping and praying that a week will be enough. Give it a week and that will be three weeks from the injury. Three weeks isn’t a long time for a rib injury but hopefully it is enough so fingers crossed.”

While Emmett is riding his machine, Thomas is left to assist in hospitality, “I think I’m doing a bit of everything. I’ll spend some time in the garage and try and make things as easy as I can with Sean and the bikes. I’ll spend some time in hospitality helping – I’ll be a general gofer!” he smiled.

Just as the Samsung Suzuki team had turned a corner on bike development Dean Thomas suffered set back when he crashed during free practice injuring his ribs at Knockhill.

“It didn’t quite go to plan,” he said, “We made a few changes for this weekend with the bike to try and go forward a bit really. Dunlop have been trying to help us out too, they have been working with us and up graded the tyres to help us go forward. We were running in eighth to tenth in the session, came in for a few little changes went back out and was about twelfth.

They were progressing and working through tyres when the crash occurred, “We tried some different spec tyres in the second session and went forward again, I was comfortable to be honest in eighth and ninth which is great considering where we have been all weekend. Plus they were consistent laps which would do full race distance. I just got caught out, I came out of the chicane and I didn’t go over it any quicker I just changed direction marginally faster than I had previously.”

That was enough for the bike to flick him off, “I just flicked off and landed on top of the bike and did the old Randy Mamola style, you know legs off one side. I thought I had saved it and then we got onto the gravel and it started to tank slap and just as it pitched me off I caught the handle bars in the ribs again. It got me just in the same place as I got hit last year. So the top and bottom of it is I’ve cracked a couple of ribs again so that is me done for this weekend.”

His team-mate Sean Emmett has been drafted in by the team to run on the Superbike instead of his usual Superstock duties, “Sean loves the bike but he hasn’t found his feet with it, he has been a bit unlucky with the rain today but I think he will do well on it tomorrow,” commented Thomas.

Looking on the bright side of things Emmett will be able tot give the team another view on the bike, “It will be good for the team to have another rider on the bike so we have consistent feedback from two riders. It won’t do any harm, my ride is not at risk so it is just a matter of me healing up and getting back to it for Oulton Park. Sean can have a run round and it will be good for his confidence as well. He has had a tough year with the Superbike he was on and he is loving the Superstock but it doesn’t hurt to be back on a competitive Superbike. I think it will be good all round.”

He is a little disappointed with what has happened but is hoping to pull it all back at Oulton Park in just two weeks time, “It is just a shame as we had finally found our feet with some things, the tyres had moved on a little bit for us, and Dunlop have been great and an opportunity was there, I think, to run top six. It has gone missing now so we will have to see, hopefully at Oulton Park we can put it all back together and go from there.”

Round eight of the Bennetts British Superbike

Championship will take place on the 13th – 15th July at Oulton Park in Cheshire.

Dean Thomas aboard his Samsung Suzuki Superbike had a suitable result at round six of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship at Mondello Park in Ireland. He qualified in 16th place and finished race one in 14th and race two in 13th.

“It’s not been too bad, not quite to plan, we were hoping to run top ten which I feel we are capable of but I just got held up in the first one,” he explained, “By the time I got a rhythm and got through I couldn’t get to where I wanted to be. The times weren’t too bad for where we wanted to be, I’m back in the points but not far enough up the list for my liking.”

Mondello is not usually Thomas’ favourite circuit but he admitted it is now starting to grow on him. “I actually quite enjoyed riding here on this bike which is a first. We just didn’t have enough time we did hope that the base setting that we ran would move us forward, but we made a change for the first race to the second race and it made things ten times worse. I think we may have stumbled onto something using the softer map,” he said.

He feels the way forward is to reduce horse power as he went on to say, “We don’t run traction control but nearly everyone else does so maybe we have learned something, maybe we need to know more horse power out of it and see how we go. A thirteenth and a fourteenth it will do I suppose. We’ll just move onto Knockhill and see what we can do.”

Unlike Mondello he enjoys racing at Knockhill, “I do like riding round Knockhill, it can be a messy track at times, and it’s aggressive like Mallory. That said I do enjoy it so fingers crossed the weather will be one or the other and not in between. I’m quietly confident that we have found something and I think it will make a big difference. We will do some home work and see how we go.”

Round seven of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship takes place at Knockhill in Scotland on the 29th and 30th June and race day on 1st July.

Dean Thomas has qualified his Samsung Suzuki in 16th place for round six of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship at Mondello Park in Ireland.

The weather has been typically Irish and rained incessantly as Thomas says, “It has been cold and wet! But its not gone too bad to be honest I mean the conditions have been terrible really for the last couple of days and we have no wet miles on these bikes so we have been out there most of the session just to get miles on and miles for me”

He has slotted into his usual position on the Suzuki, “Gets us up the pace and we’ve been running in the top twelve of fifteen which is our usual bracket for every session. I qualified in 16th which is not as good as we had hoped but not a million miles away either. Greg is twelfth and there are a few riders who are all over the show. Lap time wise I’m reasonably happy. We have made a few changes to the bike and we went backwards and then went forwards. There were things we didn’t think would work worked and it was all a bit strange we are making progress,” he commented.

The weather and the Mondello circuit has lead to an interesting grid which could play into Thomas’ hands, “The grid is mixed up and it may benefit us plus the weather is set to improve. For the fact that nobody has had any dry time it could actually benefit us tomorrow so I’ll get out there and see what happens.”

In the four week break since Snetterton the team haven’t done any testing but have worked on some little improvements, “The guys have been prepping and cleaning the bikes and getting more organised and structured. We haven’t had a chance to do any miles on the bikes but on the flip side we don’t have anything to test on this bike it is an ’05 John Reynolds machine so it is at its best.”

Thomas has admitted that the twisting Irish circuit is not his favourite, “Mondello is not my favourite track, I’ve been here four years and I’ve had one decent year where I was front row and got two front rows. Be good to have a reasonable result and move onto the next round,” he finished.

Dean Thomas secured a thirteenth place finish in race two of round five of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship at Snetterton.

Race one didn’t exactly go to plan and resulted in a DNF as Thomas explained, “I got a bit of a bad start which was down to me for sure. I was just trying to get back through the field and I had made up three of four places and I was gradually getting through. We had made some small changes to the bike for the race as we hadn’t found the setting we needed for this track so it was worth the gamble. Unfortunately, we made a bit of a mistake and I just couldn’t stop, each time I went for the brakes the forks were bottoming out and I was running on.”

Not being able to stop is always a big concern especially on a track like Snetterton where it is all about speed and things went from bad to worse for Thomas. “I slip streamed someone on the front straight and dived under them and I thought I had just made it but I went in too deep and I couldn’t stop!” he lamented, “That was it I was straight off the end of the front straight, out passed the Armco, straight through all the fields and straight out the other end. I was pretty much stuck out there, took a while to get back. So that was the end of that one. By the time I had made it back, the rest of the field had actually done another lap!”

He got things under control in race two and had a good battle going on for tenth place, “Second race was better but I still had to make my way through the field a little bit but finished in thirteenth. I was fighting with the bunch for tenth so it wasn’t a bad result considering the hassle we’ve had this weekend with a few bits and pieces going wrong but we seem to be running in tenth or thirteenth for some reason. We need to make some changes and make the second bike up to speed and move on to Mondello and see what happens,” he said.

Although there have been a few issues this race weekend, Thomas feels the team are gelling well, “The Samsung Superbike team are working well and they are putting the effort in. They are trying but this weekend it just didn’t quite go to plan for us that is all.”

There is now a break in the season before the Paddock heads across the water to Mondello Park in Southern Ireland, the team hope to use that time to catch up on bike development. “We need prep time really because the bikes are a little older we are constantly trying to catch up with the bikes and there is a bit of a different between bike number one and bike number two. So we will spend time doing that then move onto Mondello and see how we go there,” finished Thomas.

The sixth round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship takes place at Mondello Park on the 15th – 17th June.

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.

Dean Thomas had a good day at the office qualifying in difficult conditions aboard his Samsung Suzuki Superbike at Oulton Park in tenth place.

The rain came down in the session before the Superbikes were due on track and they were left with a damp patchy track to qualify on. Despite that Thomas pulled in a solid result, “I’m extremely pleased with that result. The Samsung Superbike team has been working hard this past couple of months and each round has got better and better. Silverstone we were a bit unlucky as I’ve said before we’ve had some start problems and theoretically we should have been a bit further up.”

The team have made good progress as Thomas went on to say, “Here we have gone forward, the rain coming in this afternoon hindered things a little bit. We were running in the top eight for a fair portion of the qualifying session and we only dropped down to tenth at the very last minute. We are in amongst the Rizla Suzuki’s and everybody else, which is good; I’m looking forward to race day. Hopefully the weather will either do one of the other; this in between stuff is not a lot of fun”

Commenting on the difficult conditions Thomas said, “It was really greasy and not much fun to start with to be fair. The problem is you can’t really tell if it is drying out or not, the tar changes colour all round the race track so you get big black sections that you think are wet until somebody comes barrelling past you and you realise that it is not. I think if it is misty tomorrow it is going to cause a lot of carnage for sure. It is always like that here, at Oulton Park it is either brilliant sunshine or it is in between weather. You don’t seem to get one or the other. It’ll be one of those where you just get out and start and see what happens.”

His plans for race day are two top ten finishes, “A top ten is what we are looking at. We have been finishing thirteenth and fourteenth, we need to be moving up into the top ten bracket. The guys we are in amongst now are the guys I would say the bike and the package are capable of running with. So a top ten would be nice,” he concluded.        

-end-
Louise Cain
louise@vitessepr.co.uk

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.