work to do again in Race Two where he worked hard for another top ten finish although nearly thirty seconds back from the race winner.
TEAM GOELEVEN Lorenzo Baldassari’ s performance at the previous Magny-Cours round had been one of his strongest of the season to date and he looked like he was going to carry that form through to Cremona with a qualifying time just half a second slower than Lecuona’ s pole winning lap. That gave him 6th on the grid which he converted into a 4th-place finish, bearing in mind again that he gained two positions because of Montella and Surra’ s misfortune. Balda’ was perhaps fortunate not to incur further penalty from the Sprint Race accident that took out Gerloff and, starting from tenth in Race Two, he lost several places almost immediately before an impressive run through the field landed him a seventh-place finish. That Sprint Race crash had cost him dearly and his slow race starts don’ t help either.
HONDA HRC Surprise performance of the meeting was Jake Dixon, finally giving Honda HRC something positive to smile about. Qualifying in 18th usually guarantees a rider isn’ t going to feature in the race results but no one told Dixon this. He converted that 6th row start into a 9th place finish in Race One, a feat he repeated in the Sprint Race which is very impressive given how short, at 37km, the Sprint Race is compared to the full length races of nearly 90km. 9th in the Sprint Race gave him a third row start for Race Two and he converted that into a 6th place finish, his best ever WorldSBK result. Outscoring every Yamaha and BMW rider would have felt good after an otherwise fruitless and frustrating season following the early season hand injury, which took a lot longer to recover than expected. Hopefully he’ ll carry the good form to the final two rounds.
YAMAHA It was another tough weekend to be on
KIWI RIDER 35