More Top Ten finishes at the 2...

The final day of the first FIM Superbike World Championship weekend for the bimota by Kawasaki Racing Team delivered two more top ten finishes for Alex Lowes and Axel Bassani. Lowes’ seventh place in the ten lap Superpole race was the single best result of the Phillip Island weekend for the BbKRT squad.

After all the pre-season anticipation and vast amounts of hard work and effort to get on the grid the BbKRT squad left Australia with each of their riders taking away consistent top ten finishes in all three races.

Lowes’s race record at PI on the WorldSBK spec KB998 Rimini reads 8-7-8, while Bassani was usually in close proximity to his team-mate with his finishing record of 9-9-10. Both Sunday races were held in dry and realtively mild conditions compared to those experienced during a very hot Race One on Saturday 22 February.

The ten-lap Superpole race at Phillip Island saw Lowes take a seventh place finish, ending up just 0.376 seconds behind the top six. Lowes was, in fact, less than 2.5 seconds from a podium place after ten intense laps of the 4.445km long Phillip Island circuit.

Bassani ran inside the same group as Alex in Race Two, and his top ten placing made it a more than solid weekend for the entire new bimota by Kawasaki Racing Team. Once again, the long 20-lap race was held in two parts, with a mandatory tyre change stop at half race distance.

In the championship standings, after three individual races for each rider, Lowes is ninth with 19 points and Bassani tenth with 14 points.

The next round takes place at the Autodromo Internacional do Algarve, in Portugal, from 28-30 March.

Alex Lowes (BbKRT Rider): “It was good on Sunday and I think we improved the bike a little bit as the weekend went on. The races were solid. We finished in the positions we thought we might finish in - seventh and eighth today - but I did not have the confidence in the bike to really fight and was missing the ability to pass. I was stuck for the whole second race behind Andrea Locatelli. Respect to him because he made no mistakes, but I was in the position that if he went quicker I went quicker, but I couldn’t get past him. If I step back, and assess the whole week of official testing and then the first race weekend, it was a good week. We got a lot of information, this was our first time trying the bike in hotter conditions, the first time every trying the bike with an SC1 tyre in the back, and there are only two bimota KB998 Rimini race bikes in the world - Axel’s and mine. We finished all three races and we will take a lot of information back to Europe. We have to be happy with the solid job we did.”