Muff fourth in BSB EVO at new look snetterton
Swiss rider Patric Muff had another great weekend on the Quay Garage Tyco Honda when he finished fourth in the second BSB Evo race of the day at the Snetterton circuit in Norfolk, the new-look ‘300’ circuit attracting a record weekend crowd of 43,000. Muff opened his account with a fifth place in race one but with his second race fourth has move back to fourth overall in the points chase and the half-way point in the 12-round championship. Muff’s second race effort also saw him finish 15th overall in the race against the fully-tuned superbikes on his Evo bike which, under the rules, does not have such a high state of engine tuning. Muff was delighted and said: “I’m really happy with my second race today. It’s like every weekend so far, it’s always a new track for me but we keeping working away and gradually improve the lap times all weekend. Now I’m looking forward to going to Oulton Park in two weeks time because it’s a track we’ve raced on earlier in the season.” The team’s sole BSB rider at Snetterton, Peter Hickman didn’t quite enjoy the same level of success as Patric. He crashed in practice – his first ‘off’ of the season - and then couldn’t string a fast lap together in qualifying, although he had shown throughout practice that he had a good race pace on race tyres. He finished a promising tenth in race one but never got the chance to improve on the result in the second encounter when his bike ground to a halt after five laps. The race was red-flagged to deal with a crash and Hickman’s bike was recovered to the pits but it was diagnosed with a crankshaft sensor failure and there was no time to repair it for the restart. Hickman said: “It’s a real shame because we had improved the bike for race two and I felt pretty confident I could go better than the tenth place I scored in race one. But that’s how it goes sometimes.”Quay Garage Tyco Honda team owner Ian Woollacott said: “It’s been a disappointing weekend and we didn’t get the results we had anticipated. Patric rode well again but he was struggling for drive grip in both races, but then I think everyone did this weekend. “Peter’s downfall was qualifying so he had to start from the fourth row. He looked set to build on his first race tenth until the technical failure. “We’ll regroup and go to Oulton Park in two weeks. Peter has slipped outside the top six cut-off for the Showdown that decides the title, so we need some big points from him to claw his way back into contention. And it’s going to be interesting to see how Patric fares on the circuit he’s already had previous racing experience on.