WSB Rd. 7, Brno, Czeck Republik, Sunday 17th July, 2005
Weather: sunny R1 26°C, R2 27°C
Track: dry, R1 40°C, R2 dry, 45°C
Spectators: (31’000 overall 3 days)

Race 1:
Winston Ten Kate Honda rider, Karl Muggeridge, struggled with front end and rear grip in the first seventh round World Superbike championship race at Brno this afternoon, after being quickest with consistend lap times in the morning warm-up.

In cooler temperatures than yesterday’s qualifying sessions that saw him start from fifth places on the grid, Muggas managed only an thirteenth place finish after 20 laps of the 5.4km Czech circuit. The race was won by championship leader, Troy Corser.

Ronald ten Kate – team manager: “Karl was quickest in morning warm-up after a long run on his race tyres but got some strange front tyre wear in the race. It seemed to start quite early on so we’ll have to look at the chassis and suspension data to see if anything has changed from warm-up to race. We could all see that Chris was struggling too so we may have to consider changing something quite dramatically for the second race this afternoon.”

Muggas comments: “Even from the first lap I had a couple of front end scares and after three laps I just didn’t have any grip there, it was really tough to bring the girl home. We knew the front end would cause us some problems here because of the nature of the circuit but we haven’t been here before so we’ve been trying to find our way since Friday. We made some changes to the front forks this morning in warm-up and I was quickest so it’s a little mysterious what happened out there.”

Race 2:
Winston Ten Kate rider Karl Muggeridge slipped back from second place in the early laps to take ninth position at the flag in the second race of round seven of the World Superbike Championship which had to be restarted after a few laps because of oil on the track. However the race got restarted as a complete new race with the normal starting positions.

Japanese rider Noriyuki Haga won the race with series leader Troy Corser in second Winston’s Vermeulen in third.

Muggas comments: “I got a lot much better start at the restart of the race and the front felt very different comparing to the first race, it was a complete different bike. I got past Abe on the second lap and saw Troy not that far in front of me so I tried to stay with him for as long as possible but soon realised that I didn’t have the rear grip he had. To be honest mine dropped drastically off pretty soon after the first few laps, I just didn’t have the drive out of the corners that the other guys did, so it was tough to stay with them and impossible to make a move on them. We were struggling all weekend with the front and spent so much time to get that working that we neglected the rear a bit, especially as we put the new link in that we are supposed to test this week in Lausitzring. So we didn’t really have much experience with it, but I decided to take the gamble. I hope the two day test will give us some solutions, kind of getting tiered of dropping back after half race distance.”

Ronald Ten Kate – Team Manager: “We managed to get the front end of Karl’s bike working a little better than in race one but we sacrificed a serious amount of rear end grip, meaning he couldn’t hold on to his good start. We’re heading from here and going straight to the Eurospeedway at Lausitzring to do some testing where we have a lot of new things to try”.