It was a difficult weekend for Jason O’Halloran and the Honda Racing team at Cadwell Park, with the Australian unable to break into the top 10 in both races.
O’Halloran went into the weekend still recovering from his broken ankle and could only qualify 12th on the grid for race one. Despite this initial set-back, O’Halloran made a great start to the race and soon found himself in seventh.
Things would soon turn sour for O’Halloran though as a coming together with Josh Brookes led to the Honda man being forced off the circuit at Hall Bends. O’Halloran rejoined down in 13th, which where he would finish the race.
Starting the second race 13th on the grid, O’Halloran dropped places early on but over the race distance fought back aboard the CBR to finish 11th. Looking back over the weekend, O’Halloran struggled to put his finger on what went wrong for him and the team. He commented:
“It’s been a really tough weekend for us here at Cadwell and I have never struggled so much here in my whole racing career, I don’t know what we were missing or where it went wrong but it’s just been really, really tough all weekend. We missed the mark with it and it’s a hard place to ride when you’re not struggling and to ride with things not 100% it’s even tougher.
“I’m devastated with today, normally this is a really good track for me and I was just riding around then, I wasn’t even racing, we’ve got to leave here, pick our heads up and look towards Silverstone which is a completely different track and should hopefully suit us a little bit better.”
The weekend’s results leave O’Halloran 10th in the championship standings, 32 points behind the top six showdown positions. Team manager, Havier Beltran, admitted that today’s results have made it much harder to achieve their showdown goals. He said:
“It’s been a difficult weekend if I’m honest and it;s not the result I thought we were going to get with Jason, we know he can be a lot stronger here and believe there is a lot more to come from him, but for whatever reason we didn’t have that this weekend. I am disappointed as it makes it even harder for the showdown and at the end of the day that’s where we need to be.”
Round nine of the 2018 Bennetts British Superbike Championship is a triple-header at Silverstone in three weeks time.
