TT racer Gary Johnson celebrates BSB victory
Following a disappointing 2010 Isle of Man TT, Gary Johnson is celebrating after snatching victory in the Evo class at the weekend’s British Superbike Championship round.
The BSB round at Knockhill was hit by atrocious weather, the conditions seeing the opening superbike race restarted three times and the second race abandoned altogether.
Johnson overcame the tricky conditions to take victory in his class at the end of the shortened 15-lap race. The overall race was won by fellow TT star Michael Rutter.
Johnson qualified his AIM Suzuki in 25th, but was elevated from the seventh row to the fourth thanks to the multiple false starts. He was up to second in the Evo class, and 13th overall by the end of the first lap and battled on to take 11th by the middle of the race, now leading the Evo section. Although Johnson, from Broughton near Brigg, lost a position to Andrew Pitt in the closing stages, he still did enough to hold onto class honours.
He said:
“It’s about time I got a win.”
“I feel that after last week it would be nice to get two podiums on the bounce and that’s exactly what I achieved. We changed the settings for qualifying, I had been getting better and better and in the last practice session I was fastest on corrected time, putting a load of consistent laps together. But we ended up going a bit too far with the alterations which resulted in me having a poor qualifying position.”
“I got three good starts and knew I was the fastest rider in the Evo class. I had Chris Walker in front of me and I didn’t need to pass him so I just followed him around. But then Andrew Pitt came past and he was holding me up a bit. He was firing it into the corners and I nearly ran into him. I made a few mistakes and thought it best to just follow him home. I was riding well within my comfort zone and knew I could find another two seconds if I needed to but I thought it was more important for me to get a decent result so just cruised in.”
Race two was affected by heavy rain and high winds that caused a multi-bike pile-up at Sears on the first lap, and Johnson was unable to avoid the fallen bikes that went down just ahead of him. The race was red flagged and after another lengthy delay the officials had no choice but to abandon the meeting because of the strengthening wind that was gusting up to 70mph.