The HM Plant Honda team endured a challenging weekend at the tenth round of the MCE Insurance British Superbike Championship at Croft as both Josh Brookes and Ryuichi Kiyonari had to work hard following a tough qualifying on Saturday.

In the opening race Josh raced hard to overcome some problems with settings that the team had experienced over practice and qualifying to finish sixth as Kiyo had a bad start off the line and moved up from 22nd to just outside the top ten in eleventh. In the second race both Kiyo and Josh were embroiled in a race-long battle but in the closing laps worked their way through to fourth and eighth respectively.

In the Metzeler National Superstock 1000 Championship Steve Plater had his best performance since returning from injury with a solid seventh place for the HM Plant Honda team.

Kiyo said:

“I am disappointed for sure with today as I wanted to win and I haven’t finished on the podium. I put pressure on myself after qualifying as I had that crash which meant I was on the third row and it isn’t always easy to pass around here. We didn’t make many changes between the races, just minor adjustments but we have made progress from practice to the race it is just disappointing it wasn’t enough. I think that maybe I was tense for the first race and made some mistakes, but the second one was better and I had to fight hard for the positions. I am not worried about Silverstone as I think now that we can go back and aim for wins as we need them for the championship with only five races remaining.”

Josh said:

“It hasn’t been a good weekend for me and I am just going to put it behind me. We thought this could be a strong round for us, we were on the podium twice last year but we haven’t been as competitive as we should have been and it has been a struggle. We had a bad start to the weekend and never really recovered and it was hard to know what we were doing wrong, but we need to look at what has happened this weekend in terms of the way we work through the changes and resolve it. Race two was better than race one for me, but we didn’t make any real drastic changes as it could have made it worse. We are just going to look at the weekend and then prepare for a better weekend at Silverstone.”

Steve said:

“It has been a good weekend for me overall and coming here I want to chip away and improve on the results we had at Cadwell Park, which is what we have done. My lap times improved and I was just 0.8 seconds off the fastest lap, but my fitness shows towards the end of the race as I was finding it harder in the last laps. I feel like we are moving forward though and I think we should be in a stronger position at Silverstone in two weeks’ time.”

Team Manager Havier Beltran concluded:

“That wasn’t the Croft weekend we were hoping for. It just simply didn’t come together for Josh in terms of a setting he was comfortable and confident with and it just wasn’t enough to be up fighting for the win come race day. Kiyo obviously crashed in qualifying but that wasn’t really a big deal, but there was an issue with a speed sensor which was causing him problems. They both had to start from the third and fourth rows for race two and that was always going to make it an uphill battle, but for Kiyo to salvage fourth from there was a good result. We will regroup ahead of Silverstone and aim to come back stronger there. For Steve he has really progressed since his return from injury and his seventh place was pleasing for the whole HM Plant Honda team. He can only get stronger from the next round.”