Strong finishes for Christian Iddon and Ben Currie at Knockhill after closing their opening races in fifth and fourth respectively

Superbike

Christian was showing good pace through his Free Practice sessions at Knockhill but that wasn’t fairly reflected in qualifying and he lined up on the Superbike grid on the Oxford Products Racing Ducati Panigale V4 R this afternoon in twelfth.

He made up a position on his opening lap, and by Lap 3 had climbed a couple more places to ninth. Half-way through the 20-lap BikeSocial Sprint race Christian was up to seventh, albeit gifted one of those places after Charlie Nesbitt crashed out unhurt.

Ryan Vickers took that position from Christian a few laps later but as the race came to its conclusion Christian had already got that place back. He went on to pass Leon Haslam into Taylors on the penultimate lap, going on to match his previous and best performance of the season to date in fifth.

Christian’s best lap time of 47.652 will see him line up for the first of his two 30-lap races at 1:35pm tomorrow on the third row of the grid in eighth.

Supersport

Ben Currie got his weekend off to a fantastic start at Knockhill after topping the free practice combined classifications in first place. A front row start looked to be on the cards, but Ben ended up qualifying in fifth place for the opening Sprint race on Saturday.

Ben held his position for the first half of the 20-lap race, with the top five riders creating a gap ahead of the rest of the field, eventually splitting into two groups themselves.

Lap 11 saw Ben pass Jamie Perrin to move up into fourth, and he went on to take the chequered flag on the Panigale V2 in that same position with a healthy 2.5s gap.

Ben lines up for tomorrow’s Supersport 26-lap race in fifth once again, with his race scheduled to start at 3:45pm.

Iain Hopcroft – Team Manager

“Both riders worked well through practises. During Christian’s practises we were second and fourth for a while, but qualifying didn't come to fruition or reflect the hard work he had put in. But everybody was so close, the top 18 were split by something like 0.75s so very little movement or error made a big difference in the starting grid position. But Christian seemed to make that up with very good pace throughout the race.

Christian starts P8 tomorrow putting us a notch up on the grid and that will give us a chance of getting away with the guys at the front and staying with them because our pace was the same as those front guys, we just weren’t right there. in today’s race.  

With Ben we’ve got some things to work on. We’ve tried some different setups over the weekend so far, electronically and suspension wise. We will do some more adjustments in preperation for tomorrow's race to give him the advantage in the place that he’s lacking, and then we have another go!”