The second round of the 2017 FIM Superbike World Championship has drawn to a close, with Nicky Hayden claiming his best result of the season so far, a seventh place in front of the Thai crowd at Chang International Circuit. His Red Bull Honda World Superbike team mate Stefan Bradl crashed out at turn 12 during the sixth lap and could not continue the race.

The initial race came to an early end on lap six, when Savadori suffered a technical problem that led to a high-side at turn 12; red flags were deployed and a new 16-lap race was called by World Superbike Race Direction.

With the new grid based on official race positions from the end of lap four, Hayden launched himself off eighth place, while Bradl was five slots back in 13th. Both riders enjoyed a good start to the new encounter and joined a five-strong pack battling for fifth place.

On lap six, Bradl lost the front of his Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP2 while running in tenth place and closing in on his team mate. Hayden, on the other hand, moved up a couple of positions during the central part of the race and maintained his seventh place until the chequered flag.

The World Superbike championship will return to action in three weekends at the MotorLand Aragón circuit in Spain.


Nicky Hayden 69 - 7th

The bike worked much better after the red flag and I was actually able to do my best lap-times of the weekend. We had a couple of good laps and I was quite consistent; I found myself in that group fighting for fifth place but then Leon’s bike started to blowing some smoke and all I did was trying to stay out of trouble. That cost me some time and when he retired I had already lost touch to Chaz for sixth place, so after that it was a lonely race for seventh. Things went a little bit better than yesterday but there is still a lot of work to do to close the gap with the leaders. Hopefully we’ll be able to get up there as soon as possible.

Stefan Bradl 6 - DNF

Unfortunately today I made a mistake and crashed: when Davies got past I did my best to stay with him but I hit the brakes a little bit too late and didn’t release them early enough before ending up on the bump in the middle of turn 12. It’s a shame, because we could have easily have scored another top-10 result if not better. Now we must stay focused and keep working hard ahead of Aragón: we are heading to the European part of the season and I hope we can make some bigger improvement before the next race.

Pieter Breddels

This morning we tried a couple of changes and they worked out OK, especially with Stefan. At the restart of the race, both riders were able to ride at a much more consistent pace: their feeling with the bike improved a bit from yesterday and so did their overall performance. Stefan was closing in on Nicky when the crash happened, but he did look like he could have battled for a good result today. Nicky rode a great race and if he wasn’t held up towards the end, he might have battled for a higher position. Overall, progress was made but and we’re still not where we want to be, however we have some more time to prepare ourselves ahead of the next race at Aragón.