This year’s Bennetts British Superbike Championship continues to be a struggle for the BMW-powered riders and at the mid-way point they’re yet to stand on the podium with two fifth place finishes for Bradley Ray their best return.

The Synetiq BMW rider took fifth in the second race at Silverstone to match the result he’d taken in Snetterton’s opener two weeks before but he was unable to get close to that in the other two races with 12th and 13th the outcome.

“Race two was encouraging and showed the potential of the package but Silverstone National can be a bike specific circuit and we struggled to find that extra little bit required in races one and three to be super competitive,” said Ray.

“Oulton is up next and a circuit more suited to the BMW S1000RR and it’s a real riders circuit; one I really enjoy. The team is working hard with development and I’m confident we can find that consistency at three good tracks that finish the season at Oulton, Donington and Brands GP.”

Ray, currently sitting in tenth overall in the Championship standings, fared slightly better than Rich Energy OMG Racing’s Luke Mossey and Hector Barbera, who each had a best result of tenth at Silverstone, and also Global Robots’ Peter Hickman who was again left scratching his head after three more tough races.

Indeed, save for Ray’s fifth place, the quartet spent the majority of the races circulating together on the edge of the top ten with tenths, elevenths and twelfths the outcome, Hickman again struggling with braking issues and outright pace..

A Showdown contender for each of the last three seasons, he’s yet to finish higher than 11th and finds himself languishing in 15th overall after nine of the 18 races. The Louth-based rider and his team again tried everything they possibly could to turn their fortunes around even resorting to some ‘out-the-box changes’ but it was all to no avail.

“To say it’s been a tough, and frustrating, weekend would be an understatement and we’ve made every possible change you can think of to the bike,” said Hickman.

Whatever you can think of, I can guarantee we’ve done it but the feeling with the bike has still been the same and the tyre change for 2020 has really hit us and the bike hard.

“With the amount of changes we’ve made, the bike should have been either unbelievably bad or unbelievably good but it was neither.

“The feeling felt exactly the same and it’s hard to know what else we can do; all the other BMW riders seem to be in the same position too.”

“The bike itself doesn’t feel too bad but we’re just not fast enough or competitive enough so it’s a hard one to take right now. The amount of hard work from the team has been unreal so that’s what we’ll continue to do.”