John Burrows feels his Cookstown/BE Racing team will be in a stronger position to challenge for some positive results at this weekend’s Tandragee 100 in Co Armagh.

Burrows, who called time on his career last year, fielded three riders at Cookstown, with Stephen Thompson riding the Suzuki GSX-R1000, Michael Sweeney on the RS250 Honda and Nigel Moore competing in the Supertwin class on he Kawasaki ER6.

Poor weather during practice on Friday left the team on the back foot and Burrows admitted that the opening Irish national roads meeting of 2013 became a testing ground for his riders as they prepare for a busy few weeks ahead.

Burrows said: “The dreadful weather we had recently stopped all my riders getting to grips with their new machinery in testing, so basically we had to use Cookstown to get up to speed and iron out all our teething troubles.

“We didn’t get any notable results but all my riders made progress.”


Thompson finished 14th in the Open ‘A’ race and although he will skip Tandragee, the Crumlin man is excited about the potential of the big Suzuki ahead of this month’s Vauxhall North West 200.

“The Suzuki is an absolute rocket-ship and I’m sure when we get to the North West we’ll be a front-running package,” said Thompson. “I had to use Cookstown to basically familiarise myself with the machine.”

Moore had qualified in fourth position for the Supertwin race but was ultimately left disappointed with a ninth place finish.

The Dungannon man felt his ER6 lost power as a result of overheating on the line.

“I qualified fourth fastest and I was hopeful of improving further in the race, but we were held an awful long time on the starting grid and the 650 overheated,” said Moore, who won the ill-fated Lightweight race on the KMR Kawasaki at the Manx Grand Prix last year that claimed the life of Castlecaulfield man Trevor Ferguson - an incident that led Ryan Farquhar and Burrows to quit the sport.

“The overheating drained her of a lot of power and I just had to nurse her to a top ten finish.”

Sweeney failed to finish the 250cc race due to a broken reed valve.





Kyle White
.