Brands Hatch GP: Rounds 16-17-18

It was a tough finish to the 2020 season for the Oxford Products Racing team at Brands Hatch. Tommy Bridewell ended the season with three solid results.

The sun was out for the final round of the Bennetts British Superbike at the glorious Brands Hatch GP circuit, The team gets one practice on the Friday afternoon to collect some data before moving into Saturdays qualifying knowing that rain was forecast overnight.

The practice session on Saturday morning was in drying conditions which saw the team lose some precious track time and Tommy qualified in 15th place for the opening 16-lap race on Saturday afternoon.

Despite a great start the front pack had managed to break away slightly and Tommy was able to work his way through to ninth.

He moved up to 12th on the grid for the second race on Sunday afternoon, he got a steady start and was able to make up a couple of places over the 20-lap race. With competition being so close his race lap time put him backwards on the grid for the final race of the season where he had to start from 15th position. He got a fantastic start and had his best race of the weekend so far, making some confident passes and worked his way through to seventh position and with the top 16 riders all within 1 second of each other it was great to see Tommy carving his way to securing 7th place in the overall Championship standings.

Tommy Bridewell - “It’s not all down beat; we were just experimenting with the bike all weekend. We had nothing to lose; the goal for us all weekend was to treat the weekend as a test. The plan over the weekend was to see what was working and what wasn’t.

In the shorter race on Saturday the bike wasn’t bad, but I just didn’t have the pace of the front runners. We felt good in morning warm-up and we made some changes for race two, but we went in the wrong direction and it made the bike very difficult to ride.

For the final race of the year we went the totally opposite to race two and things did feel a lot better and the bike was working really well and we dialled a lot of the issues out. When we lose fuel and tyre life we start coming across a few problems, my grid positions for the races made it very difficult to get any strong results this weekend.

I am happy with how the weekend went in general and we learnt a lot, how the bike worked and the progress that we made throughout the weekend. We have a few ideas going into the winter and it will be a long one so plenty of time to analyse the data and make some positive changes.”

Iain Hopcroft - “ This year has been full of action from tough hard fought weekends to winning races, I can’t thank Tommy and the team enough for all the hard work and dedication to put such a good package together, it’s been tough without the fans cheering us on but with the power of social media and the TV we know just how much support we have out there.

Huge thanks to all the sponsors for their continued support through the stressful times of this pandemic because without them we could not make any of this happen. We are really looking forward to what 2021 brings and the new calendar looks very interesting for us and the fans.”

In other news, the Moto Rapido supported Ducati Tri Options Cup race team of Josh Day riding the ‘Host IT’ Ducati V2 secured the Championship title and retained the number 1 plate for 2021.