Bike failure denies Laverty points in race one

Milwaukee Aprilia’s Eugene Laverty was left a disappointed figure after his RSV4 broke down on the final lap whilst he was running in seventh place.

The Northern Irishman’s return to the World Superbike Championship hasn’t been the easiest, with a number of issues at Phillip Island with the Aprilia’s set-up making life difficult.

However, the Thailand weekend has gone much smoother, with Shaun Muir Racing beginning to make headway with the bike, thanks in large part to them reverting back to the 2013-specification chassis.

With a more familiar feeling bike underneath him, Laverty was able to drag more out of the RSV4 and managed seventh on the grid in qualifying having progressed directly through to Superpole 2 from practice.

“I was pretty happy with how Superpole went, and we found some good pace in practice,” he said.

“In the race I was going well for the first few laps, the rhythm was OK and I was able to go with the guys in front.”

Laverty stuck with the Pata Yamaha duo in the first handful of laps, and maintained a reasonable advantage over the battling Jordi Torres, Leon Camier and Nicky Hayden behind when vibrations struck mid-race.

Staring down his best result since the first race of the Qatar round in 2014, Laverty’s bike ground to a halt with an as yet unidentified technical issue on the final lap.

“In the middle of the race I had some vibrations which slowed me down, but I held onto the position,” he explained.

“Then, on the last lap, the bike broke, which was disappointing. The guys will find out exactly what happened, but it was terminal and stopped my race.

As a result, Laverty will start tomorrow’s second outing from 10^th on the grid. However, the pace he displayed today has him feeling optimistic of a decent result.

“I’ve got more optimism for tomorrow. We’ve been making fairly big steps forward all weekend, even if the results don’t show it.

“Today showed that our race pace is improving, and I think we can push that further and do better in race two tomorrow.”

Team-mate Lorenzo Savadori also made it into the second part of qualifying, marking SMR’s first double SP2 appearance in WorldSBK.

The Italian was running competitively inside the top 10 in the early stages of the race, but the same vibrations Laverty encountered caused him problems and dropped him to 13^th by the time he reached the chequered flag.