Jason O’Halloran’s hopes of lifting this year’s British Superbike Championship took a further blow at Oulton Park at the weekend with a best finish of eighth managed across the three races.

Since taking a superb hat-trick at Thruxton to bring himself right back into championship contention, the McAMS Yamaha rider has found the going tough and having closed the gap to the leaders two rounds ago to 49.5 points, his deficit has now moved back out to 84 points.

Seventh in qualifying, eighth in Saturday’s Sprint race opened his account when he struggled to get near the pace set by the leaders.

“It wasn’t a great race to be honest and we were struggling with the feeling a bit this weekend,” he said. “It’s probably the hardest I’ve had to work around Oulton. I had quite a weird feeling at the rear of the bike and whatever we did, we couldn’t seem to get rid of it.”

Sunday’s longer races followed a similar pattern with lower than ideal grid positions saw him stuck in the seventh to ninth area without really being able to make an impression. Indeed, eighth and ninth was the outcome and with Lee Jackson taking three podiums, the results saw him slip back to sixth in the championship standings.

“It’s been a difficult weekend really. It’s not ideal but I did the best job I could – we’ve just been lacking something and no matter what we did we couldn’t improve the feeling. I finished all the races which is positive, so we’ll go through everything and try to understand. Donington is a different track compared to Oulton, so hopefully we can turn up there in a different place, reset after this weekend and go again.”