Dismay for Wood and Zanotti
LOUGHBOROUGH’S British Superbike contender, Aaron Zanotti suffered a blow to his championship campaign with a pair of retirements at round seven at Thruxton.
Following a host of mechanical problems at previous rounds Zanotti was hoping for a pair of decent results at a circuit he enjoys and at which he has had points success in the past.
“Thruxton is a fast and mostly flowing track – the fastest on the BSB calendar, with 110mph laps over the 2.3 miles, but it is brutal on tyres. Pirelli produced a new rear tyre just for Thruxton this year to try and give us a tyre that would last for 20 laps.”
But Zanotti’s misfortune continued just four laps in to the first practice session – a failed engine forcing an early end to the session.
From then on the team appeared to be a second or so in arrears through the remaining sessions – never quite making up for lost time and only managing to qualify second from last.
In an action packed first race, in which one quarter of the field crashed out, the local ace was forced to retire at the half way mark with another mechanical issue.
Haslam battled from 6th for an edge-of-the-seat win from Dixon with Hickman third.
Zanotti faired a little better in the second outing – producing his fastest laps of the weekend and showing a better all round pace but at the expense of tyre wear, being forced to retire after 16 of the 20 laps.
Brookes, Haslam, Dixon, O’Halloran and Hickman dueled for the lead with Brookes taking command from the seventh lap with a whisker separating the Aussie from Hickman and Dixon. Haslam was also there but edged out with three laps remaining.
A disappointed Zanotti told the Echo, “Thruxton didn’t go according to plan at all!
“Our new motor expired after minutes and we only just got the motor, clutch, oil pump, generator and gearbox swapped in time for the second session, not really having had a chance to study the data and make changes.
“Again, we were on the back foot going in to qualifying and to cap it all I had several out-of-the-seat moments in the first race before I realized we had a tiny oil leak and had to pull in.
“We had been working to make the new rear tyre option work but ran out of track time and never got close to last year’s lap times.
“We went quicker in race two but ran out of tyre two thirds of the way through. I tried to work through the slides but was falling way off the pace. I really enjoy the Thruxton circuit so I’m quite disappointed it went this way.”