James Toseland (Winston Ten Kate Honda CBR1000RR) scored a second place and a fifth to finish an eventful weekend for the 2004 World Champion in strong points scoring style. Karl Muggeridge (Winston Ten Kate Honda CBR1000RR) made a front tyre swap on race two to improve from 11th in race one to seventh.
A bizarre start to the day saw the morning warm-up session stopped the restarted twice for crashes and oil spills, the first of which saw Toseland taken out by a wild card rider, who was later disqualified for cruising on the racing line. Toseland's avoiding action almost succeeded, but he clipped the errant rider, damaging the engine so badly that oil escaped from a hole in the crankcase, spitting Toseland off and forcing a lot of work for the Ten Kate mechanics to make the start of race one.
In the first race Toseland led for fully 14 laps, but could not resist the challenge of eventual winner Yukio Kagayama. Muggeridge, who started well from eighth on the grid, dropped through the order in the hot conditions, to finish 11th. In race two, Toseland looked on for his second podium finish, running second until the 14th lap, then dropping to fifth, with grip and traction problems on right hand corners. Muggeridge fought hard for seventh place, only seven seconds from the win.
In the championship James made ground on leader Troy Bayliss, and now sits third, 74 points behind the Ducati rider, and a single point behind Noriyuki Haga.
Ronald Ten Kate - Team ManagerAll in all, we have to be quite happy with the results that James had today, especially looking to the championship standings. We have opened a bit of a gap over some other competitors behind us, but more importantly we have closed the gap in front of us. That's the good side of things. I must admit Sunday started really badly for us. A horror accident in the morning warm-up for sure didn't help. James' number one bike was wrecked in that incident, including the engine. So we had to swap to the number two bike for the whole day. There is not a huge difference, but even a small difference is enough to move you up a couple of places anyway, with the field being as strong as it is. I'm happy that we can move onto Brands Hatch after this and for sure the motivation of James will be full on. The first race for Karl was a difficult one, and he struggled a lot, and in race two he decided to go for the same front as James was using. Apparently that was a good choice. He kept his times pretty consistent and there was only a small gap to the front. Hopefully it will give us something to work on for Karl.”
James Toseland - Race 1: 2nd position - Race 2: 5th position“It was good to get a podium in race one but there was nothing I could do when Kagayama went past me. It was strange in race two, because later in the race I was having trouble with grip on the rights, both front and rear. The little bit higher temperature in the second race made the difference, and I made a couple of silly mistakes. It was a difficult weekend; to have a crash just before Superpole and then a collision this morning. So in some ways I'm happy the way things worked out - but we could have taken advantage of Bayliss having a bad weekend a bit more than we did. But we'll keep chipping away.”
Karl Muggeridge - Race 1: 11th - Race 2: 7th “In race one we didn't have on the right front tyre I think. In race two, until lap ten, all was OK, then the grip on the corner exits started to drop off, the bike wanted to move around and it was more difficult to control. After 16 laps it got a bit worse again and just kept the bike up to finish the race. I'm not too satisfied with the results but at least we have scored two races in the points.”
Championship Standing:1. Bayliss - Ducati - 262 points
2. Haga - Yamaha - 189 points
3. Toseland - Winston Ten Kate Honda - 188 points
4. Corser - Suzuki - 173 points
5. Barros - Honda - 151 points
14. Muggeridge - Winston Ten Kate Honda - 66 points
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