It was a weekend of what could have been at Oulton Park as Stockport’s Christian Iddon narrowly missed out on a podium at his ‘home’ track in Cheshire.
A bumper crowd turned out in the May Day sunshine to witness the latest rounds of the 2017 British Superbike Championship.
The Tyco BMW rider qualified in ninth place for the first of two races at the historic parkland track and showed his potential in morning warm-up, finishing second by just nine-thousandths of a second.
Despite dropping to tenth position briefly in race one, Iddon climbed to eighth place at the flag, just a tenth-of-a-second behind the Yamaha of Josh Brookes with Leon Haslam claiming the win for Kawasaki.
Climbing to fifth on the opening lap, Iddon settled in to sixth place as he rode amongst a high-speed quintet including Luke Mossey, Jason O’Halloran, Josh Brookes and Glenn Irwin.
Iddon had risen to fifth by lap 12 and was promoted to third two laps later as Haslam dramatically collided with James Ellison [Yamaha], who had suffered a technical issue.
Nicking second place off Mossey a lap later it was a three lap dash for the line, Iddon succumbed to Irwin with a lap to go, then narrowly missed out on the final podium spot, O’Halloran claiming third place by two-tenths of a second as the chequered flag fell.
Shane Byrne took the overall race honours.
“It’s my first weekend without a trophy this year, which is a shame,” admitted Iddon.
“The two races I feel like we could have got more out of them, the first race I ended up eighth, but should have been fourth.
“I didn’t have much pace to start with and they did start to come back to me, I thought that I had the speed to come back through the pack but didn’t quite manage it.
“Then the second race we had the chance of second – it was a mad battle, it was really good fun, and just missed out on getting on the podium.”
Iddon left Oulton Park sitting third in the overall championship standings as the series heads north of the border to Knockhill in Scotland on June 16-18.
