Current Championship Position

 15th

Ben's Comments

"I thought it was impossible for things to get any worse than Brands Hatch... but they certainly did this weekend! I was heading into the round reasonably confident that we'd found a good setting at Thruxton that would allow me to run towards the front of the field. It all started when our free practice session got delayed due to some oil being dropped in other classes. Oulton Park runs a very tight noise curfew so when we did finally get out on track we were actually given a whole 7 mins of time! This was enough for 4 laps in total. I hadn't even had the chance to get up to speed... but what the laps did tell me was that the bike was having trouble downshifting. It would only downshift one gear at a time going into a corner... not great news when you need to go down 3 gears into some turns! At first we thought it might have been that the gear lever was playing up but after inspection and tightening the lever it appeared to be something more critical. This problem continued throughout qualifying and morning warm-up which meant that I was coming out of most corners at least a gear too high on pretty much every lap. We tried to solve the problem for race 1 but then the heavens threw us another problem... it started raining (heavily). Once again we were out on a wet track but this time I still had the gear shift issues. This is exagerated in wet conditions as there is no chance of trying to grab another gear late into the corner because it upsets the bike too much and would cause a huge loss of grip. During the race this was dropping me further down the field as guys who were coming out of the corners in the correct gear were easily passing me in a straight line. I was contemplating pulling in when I crossed the line and saw 2 laps to go on my pit board. I knew that there had been quite a few crashes, so thought that if I stayed out for another two laps and completed the race I could still pick up a few championship points. I had backed right off and was just looking to bring the bike home when I came around to start my last lap. Just as I touched the front brake coming into Lodge Corner the front wheel locked (or hit standing water) and tucked underneath me... sending me and the bike skidding across the tarmac at around 95mph. I banged my back and right knee pretty hard but would have been ok to make the second race... unfortunately the same couldn't be said about the bike! We were unable to get all of the parts that we needed to repair it at the track, so that was game over for the weekend. We are now faced with the task of making sure that the bike is ready for the next round at Snetterton in a couple of weeks... and that includes getting to the bottom of the gear shift problem too!"