Chaz Davies showed great maturity as he calmly took victory in a chaotic World Supersport race at Assen.
The Yamaha ParkinGO rider came through from sixth on the grid to beat Fabien Foret by over seven seconds in a race that had to be restarted twice.
The first stoppage came at the end of lap four when Sam Lowes suffered a nasty accident at the chicane. Fortunately the British Supersport champion suffered no more than concussion and a broken collarbone.
Less than a lap into the restarted race, the red flags were out again. This time, championship leader Luca Scassa was at fault after losing his bike on a kerb, and taking Hanspree Ten Kate Honda rider Florian Marino with him.
The Frenchman felt the incident had robbed him a strong result, but was encouraged by the pace had shown through the weekend.
“Of course I'm really disappointed. After all the work that we did as a team over this weekend, it's a very tough way to finish a race. I know these things can happen in a race sometimes, but I'm not happy that it happened to me today. Everything was OK in the race and I was just waiting to see how Gino Rea was going in front of me. But I have shown that I can fight for podium positions and I'm looking forward to Monza to do that again.”
When the race finally got going again, Davies escaped at the front to take his first victory of the season. But tyre problems left Foret under pressure in the closing stages, as a four man group closed in on him.
“It was a tough day but I'm happy with 20 points, but we had some pretty bad tyre issues with about four or five laps to go”, Foret explained. “I had to try to save the tyre and finish the race so I was lucky that there was a good gap to Broc Parkes in third. I had to ride really slowly just to finish the race but at the end of the day it turned into quite a good weekend. Between the tyre issue and the fact that I am still not quite 100%, it's good to get some points and I hope for Monza to be in really good shape to fight for a win”
Parkes eventually closed to within 0.848 seconds of Foret, but was also forced to defend from Robbin Harms in a fierce battle for third, the Australian edging it by just over a tenth of a second.
“I was a little bit fortunate that some other riders went out but I was unlucky to be bumped wide in the first turn, so it was just luck coming back my way”, Parkes added. “We have learned some things to take from this weekend to Monza and the team is always working on new things, so we can look forward to that. We improved the bike every day here and I had the pace so we scored a podium and got some good points again.”
Despite his failure to score, Luca Scassa retains the lead of the World Supersport Championship. The Italian's lead has been cut to three points over Parkes, with Assen winner Chaz Davies two points further back in third.
