Kawasaki’s Tom Sykes scored a third place finish in the second World Superbike race at Sepang, but an earlier crash involving his team-mate Loris Baz left him with a painful right hand injury. But the Yorkshireman battled through to keep his championship lead.

Even though Sykes had a DNF in race one, the rostrum finish was enough to retain his overall championship lead to 13 points over second place, Aprilia’s Sylvain Guintoli. Huddersfield’s finest was not able to use his right hand to its full potential - meaning he found it difficult to catch up with the Aprilia’s of Guintoli and Marco Melandri.

“We got a podium and we are still leading the championship, which is very important. We made a change to the machine after Superpole and in warm-up I was very happy with the Ninja ZX-10R and did some great lap times before the race,” said Sykes.

“I was feeling very confident. We had a gap to make up to the Aprilia’s all weekend but in warm up I felt that we could have gone racing and at least challenged them. I had a bit of a limitation in race two which created a little bit of instability with the bike because I was not able to use my right hand to its full potential.

“It is was difficult to see the two guys up front go away because if I was riding fit then I think we could have tried to give them something to think about. My crew chief had a good chat with me before race two, and he said we needed to try and do the best we can. Third is the best we could have done in that race.”

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