Haslam, Hopkins draw line under tough weekend

Leon Haslam and John Hopkins leave the tenth round of the World Superbike Championship at Brno feeling unsatisfied after a troublesome day concluded what has been a difficult weekend as a whole for the Stiggy Honda team.

Having both been knocked out during the first phase of Superpole, Haslam did manage to bring some joy to the team when an outstanding start from 17th on the grid had him circulating inside the top ten early on.

Capitalising on problems for those ahead, Halsam rose as high as sixth as he dealt with attention from Noriyuki Haga and Makoto Tamada. Although Jakub Smrz would eventually get the better of him, seventh place still represented a big improvement for the Briton.

However, despite making another good start in race two, Haslam struggled with set-up issues to eventually finish a lowly 12th.

"I am pretty disappointed with the whole weekend," he said. "We found an average set-up for race one and I was happy to be able to coming through in seventh place. We made a few changes for the second race, but I had a lot more chatter, from lap one in the second race. I was doing lap times half a second off what I did in warm-up. The group in front was not that far away but I couldn't go any faster than I did."

Hopkins, meanwhile, failed to finish either encounter after crashing out of a potential top ten result in race one before suffering technical difficulties in the second.

"I made the decision to race on a soft tyre, but lost the front of the bike as I tried to make the connection with the group in front of me and crashed out of the race. We used a harder front tyre in the! second race, but after I made a mistake at the start and lost some ground, my bike broke down and I had to return to the garage.

"Brno is a track I really like and I came here expecting a lot more, but we have been struggling here all weekend. It was definitely not the weekend we had hoped for."