Team Blackhorse Yamaha’s Ian Lougher qualified in the top 20 riding for the Repli-Cast Honda squad at Silverstone in the Relentless British 125cc Championship after suffering an oil leak which pushed him outside of an expected top ten position.
Talking about his two-race ride for fun Lougher said: “This weekend has been something really different obviously with riding myself and being in the 125ccs on a Repli-cast bike, it’s been fun.  We struggled there on the last session as we had a bit of an oil leak so I dropped from tenth to 18th on the grid so that was a bit of a shame as I thought top ten would be fine.  Anyway we are 18th on the grid and got a few improvements to do I think.”
It was at Croft a couple of weeks ago that Lougher had the idea of racing at Silverstone and last week he mentioned the idea to Gary Dawson team owner of Repli-cast who offered his now spare bike due to his usual rider Robbie Stewart out because of injury.
Lougher said: “It’s been 11 years since I’ve actually raced at Silverstone and I got pole position when I was last here.  I didn’t think I was going to get pole now, but I like the circuit and it is towards the end of the year so why not.  It’s just a one off thing for a bit of fun and its nice to race the little bikes on the road circuits but it’s not quite the same sort of scratching as here.”
The year has been a memorable one for Lougher as the Budore corner at the Ulster Grand Prix was renamed to Lougher’s in his honour.  This is 28th season of racing in which includes winning ten times at the Isle of Man TT, 32 times at the Southern 100, 127 times at Oliver's Mount, nine at the North West 200 wins and 13 times at the Ulster Grand Prix.
Talking about his own team the results have been held back due to problems with the Yamaha, but he could not be any happier with his rider Connor Cummins performance. Planning the 2010 season he said: “I am still talking to people about next year hopefully we will keep Connor [Cummins], we don’t know what we are doing exactly next year but we plan to run a Superstock 1000 team and Superstock 600, we want to find a young lad for that and as well as my own road racing next year.”