Tyco Suzuki’s William Dunlop lost out on the Cookstown 100 feature Superbike race win by just three-tenths of a second when Dan Kneen came through from the second group to beat him on corrected time.
Dunlop made a solid national road racing debut, taking third place in the Open class aboard his GSX-R1000 Superbike, boosted by a Supersport podium in Friday night’s invitation race on his Metzeler shod GSX-R600 but team boss Philip Neill has branded the system as ‘outdated.’
“I’m obviously disappointed to lose out on a race win that I felt I had well covered. When you take the chequered flag you expect to be the race winner, but I’m not a bad loser and rules are rules whether you agree with them or not. We started the weekend off well with podiums on the GSX-R600 and GSX-R1000 Superbike,” said Dunlop.
“The boys have worked really hard this past few weeks to help me feel comfortable in the team and on all machinery with the various set-ups, so I was gutted not to be able to give them the Cookstown 100 feature Superbike race win. Taking the positives, it does set us up well for the North West 200 and I think this weekend we have proved that we can be competitive and have plenty to look forward to.”
Neill added: “It was our first time to get a look at William and see how he has settled into the Tyco Suzuki team, and how he would gel with our GSX-R machinery and Metzeler tyre combination in a racing situation. The goal for the weekend was to try out some different options for William and he made great progress throughout the day and was gaining confidence with each race.
‘Two podiums in both the opening Supersport and Superbike races was a great start and in all fairness he won the feature Superbike race on track. Unfortunately we have a strange system in Ireland, with a rider in the second group being afforded the opportunity to win on corrected time.
William was unaware that he was battling with Dan in the second group, and once at the front of the field with a comfortable gap, he slowed to keep things safe, only to find he’d lost the race by three-tenths of a second.
“Overall we are very pleased with William’s performance this weekend but it is a real shame he had to be denied his first ever Superbike victory for us by an out-dated racing system that surely has no place in modern racing.”
