Victor Cox got his season back on track with a top six finish in the second round of the Pirelli National Superstock 1000 Championship at Thruxton on Sunday, but for his team-mate Filip Backlund the highs and lows of motorcycle racing were all too apparent as he crashed out of the race on the tenth lap. Backlund, who finished second on his race debut for the team at Brands Hatch last week, was thankfully unhurt in the crash which involved two other riders.

Victor and Filip arrived in Hampshire with one common goal of doing well for the team but with slighly different personal aims. Filip was looking to build on his excellent performance at Brands Hatch, whilst Victor was looking to kick-start his 2013 season following, by his own admission, a disappointing 12th place finish in Kent.

Free practice and qualifying again took place with the two group/race shoot-out system and Group B free practice saw Victor and Filip finish 7th and 12th respectively in far from ideal conditions. First qualifying saw an improvement in the weather and with it a big improvement in times as Victor went round over five seconds quicker to finish 6th in the session and 11th overall just 0.61s off provisional pole, Filip meanwhile was starting to get to grips with the unfamiliar Thruxton track and he also improved, by almost 5 seconds, to finish 15th in the group, 28th overall at 1.89s off the pace.

However, with only 7 laps completed between them, any intentions Victor and Filip had of a further improvement were dashed by the awful conditions that had greeted the riders for the second session. The organisers soon took the decision to red-flag and abandon the session, a move both riders agreed was the right one given the amount of standing water on the circuit. This meant that the grid would be determined by alternate positions from each group's combined qualifying, leaving Victor on the third row in 12th and Filip with a lot of work to do on Row 8.


To much relief the race got underway in dry conditions and as the riders sped through at the end of the opening lap, Victor had gained six places and was up to sixth, just over a second off the race leader whilst Filip had moved up three places to 25th. On the second lap, Cox was half a second clear in fourth as Filip was firmly embroiled in traffic in 26th position. For the next four laps Victor and Jonathan Howarth battled for fourth place whilst maintaining a decent gap on the chasers, Filip meanwhile was settling into the race and had moved up to 22nd. On Lap 7, Cox was demoted to sixth by Joe Burns but he was still very much in the thick of things, Backlund meanwhile was involved in a three-way Kawasaki dice with Paul Curran and Dominic Usher for a place in the Top 20.

As Burns moved clear into fourth, Victor now turned his attention to fifth place man Howarth and as the race entered the tenth lap he was right on his case, however further back Lee Johnston crashed out taking Filip and Dan Stewart with him, this brought the race to a premature conclusion with a race result declared leaving Cox in sixth and a bitterly disappointed Backlund on his way to the medical centre for a check-up.

The next round of the championship takes place at Oulton Park on 4-6 May, in the meantime team owner/rider Ian Lougher will make his first competitive appearance of the season when he competes in the Ian Watson Spring National race meeting at Oliver's Mount, Scarborough this weekend.


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