Bostrom's five alive at Brands.

Ben Bostrom was in immaculate form at Brands Hatch, running away with both races on a day which saw a record 122,000 weekend attendance at the Kent circuit.

Bostrom's Brands wins were his fourth and fifth in five attempts, a remarkable feat for a rider who suffered a serious shoulder dislocation at the Monza round earlier in the season, and follow on from race two success at Misano and another golden double at his circuit of Laguna Seca.

Ben Bostrom was in immaculate form at Brands Hatch, running away with both races on a day which saw a record 122,000 weekend attendance at the Kent circuit.

Bostrom's Brands wins were his fourth and fifth in five attempts, a remarkable feat for a rider who suffered a serious shoulder dislocation at the Monza round earlier in the season, and follow on from race two success at Misano and another golden double at his circuit of Laguna Seca.

A dramatic day of action unfolded in front of a sunbleached crowd in the English countryside, with the first race stopped after ten of the scheduled 25 laps when James Haydon's crashing machine collided with Robert Ulm's and sent both off the track at Surtees. A subsequent fuel fire was fierce enough to stop the race, with a 15 lap re-start announced.

Bostrom had been leading the first leg, and went on to win on aggregate, despite being headed by local favourite Neil Hodgson in the second part of the race. The GSE Ducati rider did enough to overhaul reigning champion Colin Edwards, and take an aggregated second, with the Honda man fighting his way forward to take the final podium place. Troy Bayliss, the world championship leader, was only fifth, a result partly of his lowly 14th place in Superpole qualifying.

In the second race, Bostrom was again the winner, heading Hodgson home by over two seconds as the pair again went head-to-head around the rises and falls of the Kent circuit. Hodgson held the upper hand early on, but had to give second best to Bostrom as the works Ducati man found reserves of pace to break the Briton's resistance.

Bayliss came through the field with similar aplomb to that shown in the first race but, with no interruption to his momentum, was able to overhaul both Edwards and Frankie Chili by the flag. The Italian Suzuki rider went on to take fourth for the second race in a row, crowning one of his better meetings this year on the Alstare machine.

Edwards' fifth place In race two means that the fight for the championship lead remained in a similar position to how it began the day, with Bayliss now 53 points ahead of the Texan Tornado. Bostrom's 50 point haul has rocketed him to a very close third, on 347 points, leapfrogging Troy Corser in the process, after the Australian rider had a nightmare of a race day, finishing only eighth and 13th in the two races.

James Toseland, Hodgson's GSE Racing team-mate, scored a career best sixth in race two, while Peter Goddard took two points for 13th in the first race, riding the all new factory Benelli.

In the Supersport World Championship support race, an eight-rider fight for supremacy ended up in a three-man last lap sort-out, with world champion Jorg Teuchert overcoming all to score his first win of the year, and ease into the championship lead. Teuchert, Andrew Pitt and James Whitham crossed the line within 0.012 seconds of each other, with Pitt taking second and Whitham third.

Paolo Casoli, the erstwhile championship leader, only managed to score seventh place, and Teuchert now sits on top of the pile with 113 points, to Casoli's 109, Pitt's 100 and Kevin Curtain's 86. Karl Muggeridge crashed out of the race, and now sits only one point ahead of Whitham and Pere Riba, who both have 63 points.

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