HM Plant Honda rider Leon Haslam has been excluded from the second Bennetts British Superbike Championship race at
Oulton Park following his incident with Tom Sykes while dicing for victory.
The pair made contact at Hizzies on lap eleven when Haslam tried to go down the inside of his rival into the right-hander of the chicane, but succeeded only in hitting the Rizla Suzuki and sending Sykes tumbling to the ground and into retirement.
Haslam himself also ran wide and slipped down to fifth place, although he was then classified in fourth place when the race was red-flagged after a fall for team-mate Cal Crutchlow at Druids.
At that point, the incident involving Sykes went before the Clerk of the Course with Sykes keen not to be drawn on what happened while the discussions were ongoing.
"I don't want to get too involved with it," he said. "As soon as I picked myself up off the deck, there were marshalls making comments about what he'd done but at the end of the day, he knows he made a mistake and it's being looked into.
"Everyone has seen it and knows what happened, so I'll leave it to other people to decide."
After reviewing video evidence and speaking to both riders, the decision was taken to exclude Haslam for careless riding under article B1.7 of the MCRCB regulations.
The HM Plant team lodged an appeal into the incident, with hopeful of being reinstated into the results. However, the decision of the Clerk of the Course was deemed to be correct, and the HM Plant man was stripped of the position.
"Tom is a competitive rider and we are racing; people will touch," Haslam had said while waiting for his appeal to be heard. "At
Thruxton, he clipped the rear end of me as we changed direction and here I tried to avoid him and move out of the way as he came across but he hit the back wheel of me again as we went through.
"It's frustrating on that side and Tom knows the score. He knows it is racing and is probably as frustrated as me."
