Quattro Plant Kawasaki's Howie Mainwaring overcame what he described as a 'difficult' MCE British Superbike weekend at Thruxton to come away with a fifth and seventh place finishes, during the double-header at the Hampshire track.

Mainwaring was in contention for a possible podium in the final outing, but got caught up in a crash involving Moto Rapido Ducati's John Hopkins and slipped back up the field.

"It has been a good weekend and it started off as a difficult one, but I managed to get through to Q3 in qualifying. Race one and race two were good, and unfortunately I got caught up in the Hopkins crash while fighting for the podium - which caught me out. I feel mega and the points have put us back in the game going into Cadwell," said Mainwaring, speaking to bikesportnews.com.

But the Kawasaki rider was involved in an incident involving Honda Racing's Jason O'Halloran, with the Australian crashing out and breaking his leg and hand during a qualifying session on Saturday after coming together with the ZX-10R of Mainwaring.

It was investigated by race control, but no one was penalised. Mainwaring did feel 'gutted' for O'Halloran after the crash and said he made a bad choice of where he was on the track, but in the end it was declared a racing incident.

Mainwaring said: "There was no real outcome over the incident in qualifying with Jason it is one of those things in racing. A bit of a bad choice for me to move to the left and a bad choice for him to go round the outside of me and we both made those choices and they didn't pay off and we ended up coming together.

"He came off worse and I feel gutted and generally feel bad and I struggled to sleep. I haven't been penalised as I didn't do anything wrong, it wasn't done maliciously it is one of those things in racing."