Peter Hickman

Louth Superbike ace Peter Hickman picked up a couple of good results at Thruxton to add to his points tally in round two of the 2010 British Superbike championship on Sunday.

Sporting a new Yamaha R1 engine in the Ultimate Racing Superbike Hicky found some extra speed and bagged his best qualifying of the new campaign with a fine 11th place, just missing out on the third and final sprint for pole which included the fastest 10 riders in the session.

“The weekend is going really well for me,” said Hicky. “I have been really happy all weekend as we have finally got a new engine in the bike which has made so much difference. Although we haven’t got as much power as the factory bikes we are a lot closer and it’s given me a fighting chance now. The bike has been working really well all weekend – I have always gone well at Thruxton anyway – the team has worked hard and I am really happy. I just needed that tiny bit more to get into the top 10 and into the final part of qualifying. This is my best qualifying position since 2006 and things are looking good for Sunday, if I can get a good start and get away we should be in for a good result.”

Race one saw Hicky get away and settle into 13th place for a couple of laps before moving forward to eventually cross the finish line in 11th place to pick up five championship points for the Northamptonshire based Ultimate Racing team.

He said: “That first race went really well for me. I got off the line ok, not brilliantly but we got caught up in the first few laps really. I couldn’t get past Christian Iddon where I wanted to so that held me up a bit. Once I finally got past him the front boys had got away then I began to struggle with tyre life as we don’t have traction control but I am pretty pleased with 11th as on paper I shouldn’t be in the top 14 to be honest because there are 14 factory bikes out there!!!”

Race two didn’t go quite so well for Hicky and he rode a lonely race to finish in 13th place to pick up a further three championship points to bring his tally to nine which place him 15th in the overall points after just two rounds.

“Not quite as good a result as race one, we had to start from 14th place because the grid goes on the lap times posted in the first race. Unfortunately my lap times were not fast enough and we were placed a row further back for the second race. I got away ok but maybe I let the clutch out a bit early and got caught up again with the same riders as in race one. I got past Iddon early on but just couldn’t keep up with Dan Linfoot as we were struggling a bit with horsepower. Other than that we seemed to be pretty close to everyone. But two finishes, both in the points, I can’t grumble at that really as we are such a small team in comparison.”

The next race is at Oulton Park in Cheshire over the May Day bank holiday when Hicky will be hoping for two good results to add to his points tally and move further up the leaderboard.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 10:31 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.