A brace of strong top six finishes from Christian Iddon [6-4] and a sixth placed finish for Tyco BMW new recruit Glenn Irwin in BSB race two, rounded out a solid weekend for the official BMW Motorrad team at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire.
Iddon’s positive weekend aboard the all new BMW S1000RR, saw him reduce the gap to the all-important top six Showdown places. The Stockport ace is now just 21 points adrift, as the series heads to his home round at Oulton Park at the beginning of September – for a crowd-pleasing Bennetts British Superbike Championship triple header.
In the National 1000cc Superstock Championship Andy Reid unfortunately crashed out of podium contention in the early laps after qualifying his Tyco BMW S1000RR on the front row. The Northern Irishman suffered an ankle injury but is hopeful of making the Oulton Park round in three weeks’ time.
Really solid day for both Tyco BMW riders in Superbike. We know Christian is a fighter and he confirmed that again today with two strong finishes which keeps him in a position to mount a showdown challenge at Oulton Park, his local circuit. Glenn continues to impress on only his second weekend on the the new S1000RR with absolutely no testing at this point.
Unfortunately our difficult season with injuries continues with Andy being the latest to suffer some misfortune. We hope he is as comfortable as possible after yesterday’s crash and we look forward to a speedy recovery.
In race one I got a good start and managed to move up the pack a little bit and settled myself into fourth. Unfortunately I just didn’t have the pace for the top three guys which was disappointing and it became a bit of a lonely race as I was just racing myself essentially, trying to defend from Scott Redding and Peter Hickman behind me. I had over 0.5s gap over the other guys for most of the race, with two laps to go I managed to break away a little a create the gap that I needed before hitting a false neutral going into Chris Curve and ran onto the grass losing two places, which was incredibly frustrating. In race two, again I pushed really hard at the beginning to see if I could match the three at the front and despite doing my best lap of the weekend I still didn’t have just quite enough to match them guys. I finished up in fourth which I’m content with and we have cut the deficit from 32 points to 21 for showdown contention. It’s going to be tight, but we have three races at Oulton Park in three weeks’ time, so plenty of points up for grabs. I’m looking forward to the challenge.
It was a positive weekend, we worked really well during Thursday’s test and throughout Friday’s practice sessions to find a very good set-up for the bike in qualifying. I have a bit of a niggle with my shoulder which always hampers me at Cadwell Park, and perhaps always will due to the demanding nature of the track, but we made it through to Q3 and secure a row three grid start for race one.
Race one was quite difficult, I made a call to move away from the setting we had in qualifying, but we went back to that for race two and had a really good bike. Our race pace was good and manage to secure a strong sixth place finish, maintaining the gap to the two riders in fourth and fifth.
I feel we have made good progress, it’s my two best results of the year and I can’t thank the whole Tyco BMW team enough.