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Portimao WSBK: ‘I feel I have let a few people down’ – Sykes

Kawasaki’s Tom Sykes had a mixed World Superbike race-day at Portimao. The Huddersfield rider finished in third in race one, but a crash on a sighting lap before race two scuppered his podium chances. His team were in a race against time to get his bike ready for the start of race two, and even though Sykes did finish, he was seven laps down and was not able to fight for any points. Now the rider feels he has let some of his team down.

Despite his race two mishap Sykes is still second in the championship fight, although 28 points behind leader Aprilia’s Sylvain Guintoli. Portimao is not the strongest circuit for the Englishman so was pleased with a third place finish in race one.

“I expected the first race to be just as close as it was, and obviously the guys who finished first and second were riding really strongly, but I was struggling a little bit with race performance. But we made a good podium and scored good points. Portimao is not one of my strongest circuits and still we could fight for the win,” said Sykes.

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His luck was to change in race two when he clipped a kerb on his sighting lap at turn one, fell heavily, and was lucky to be able to restart. He made it back to pit-lane, his team made running repairs and he lined up for the real race start in pit-lane itself. Sykes then found an issue with a broken sensor for the electronics system, damaged in the crash, and came back into pit-lane. After this was fixed he went out again to try out his new settings.

Not classified in race two as he finished seven laps down, Sykes nonetheless scored the new lap record of 1’42.475 as his team had made improvements in the bike set-up between races. But Sykes takes full responsibility for the crash that happened just before the final race of the day.

“In race two the fall was my fault because in turn one on my out lap I ran over the kerbstone on the inside. The piece of kerbstone looked quite flat but in the last moment I realised it was a big high kerb and it chucked me over the front of the bike.

“The bike flipped, landed on me and it was a big crash. It hurt my right leg and gave me a headache. We had made improvements on the bike for race two and we proved that was the case because we went on to break the lap record. I was just riding to the limits of the bike in each race.

“This is my worst circuit but in both races we raced to the limit of the package and it felt easier to do this record lap time in race two. I feel I have let a few people down but I do not want to be too hard on myself as it is the first mistake I have made for a long time.”

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