After holding provisional pole for the Brno Alstare Corona Extra World Superbike round at Brno, Chris Walker was devastated not to make it onto the front row of the grid after the Superpole session.
Walker's PSG-1 Kawasaki team tested at Brno only a few weeks ago and as soon as qualifying kicked in, Walker and his machine were immediately dialled into the circuit. He took provisional pole with a time of 2mins 3.064secs and hoped to hold onto it through Superpole, however things didn't quite to go to plan following a crash at the end of free practice two involving Klaffi Honda rider Max Neukirchner.
"I'd moved over and let Max through the lap before because I was on an out lap and Max was obviously trying hard towards the end of the session," explains Walker of the incident. "I got my head down at the end of the session - we had saved our qualifier from the morning to use at the end of practice just because we knew we had fifteen riders to wait for in Superpole, so we didn't want to end on a slow lap and then have forty five minutes to wait, so I got my head down.
"Half way around the lap I caught him up as he had finished his fast lap and he was then slowing down and in the middle of the complex. He looked over his shoulder and saw that I was coming, unfortunately for me I was committed to over take him on the right and he moved that way to make more room for me on the inside."
It was very unlucky for this to have occurred as Neukirchner knows the track really well having raced here many times, Walker's arm just clipped Neukirchner's handle bars. "Obviously I was on the outside, and hit my arm on his handle bar, fetched me off in the gravel and that was it," explains Walker.
"I was smashed as it wrecked my number one bike and it is so much better than my number two, I desperately needed to ride it in Superpole, so I was a bit smashed."
