Michael Dunlop explains ‘painful’ Isle of Man TT Superstock woes
Dunlop struggled from the off in Tuesday’s Superstock TT
Michael Dunlop says he had a blipper issue from the start of Tuesday’s Isle of Man TT Superstock race, which left him a distant third on his MD Racing BMW.
The 30-time TT winner hasn’t had an easy event on his new BMW M1000RR, and hadn’t completed many laps on is Superstock-spec bike through practice.
Despite this, BMW has been dominant in that class in recent years and Dunlop was still pegged as a pre-race favourite.
But he was out of the podium places in the early portion of the first lap, before eventually getting to third - albeit over 30 seconds from race winner Dean Harrison.
Dunlop says he suffered an electronics issue off the line, which meant his blipper stopped working properly, while he also felt the shortened two-lap distance worked against him.
“We ended up with an electronic issue,” he told TT+.
“We went off the line and it seemed to get stuck in launch control for some reason, and the blipper stopped working [and was] intermittent.
“So, it caused us a bit of pain, but in fairness to Dean [Harrison] – fair play to him.
“I knew Dean would do the first lap great – we knew that, everybody knew that.
“My first lap was horrific, obviously, just not knowing when the bike was blipping and when it wasn’t blipping.
“You use the clutch and it does [automatically] blip, it just sends it off a wee bit.
“The bike had it’s issues, again probably the lack of [track] time probably didn’t help us. The two-lap races don’t really – I struggle a wee bit with them.”
Dunlop noted after Monday’s Superbike TT, in which he was second, that he “blew a hole” in the rear tyre on the last lap.
He said this issue happened again in the Superstock race, which is proving hard to solve as “we don’t get any support” from Dunlop at the event.
“We’re still creating the same issues, but it’s just the way it is, it’s what we have to deal with at the minute,” he said when asked about his rear tyre.
“We just don’t get any support, so we just have to battle through it ourselves and try and come up with a solution.”
