Stockport’s Christian Iddon scored a brace of top-ten finishes when the Bennetts British Superbike Championship made its annual pilgrimage to Assen in the Netherlands.

Nursing a broken collarbone from his accident at Silverstone three weeks ago, it was tough going for the former World Superbike racer.

Starting seventh on the grid for race one, Iddon ran as high as fifth place, but suffering with high amounts of front tyre wear, it made it all but impossible to ride fast without crashing and the Tyco BMW rider had to settle for a hard-earned eighth position as the flag dropped.

From eleventh on the grid in race two, Iddon avoided opening-lap drama to climb to seventh.

A brief safety-car period followed and when the race resumed Christian steadily climbed to fourth, but with just five laps to go, a broken gear position sensor snatched away all Iddon’s hard work, dropping him to tenth place at the chequered flag.

Christian said: “I struggled quite a lot throughout free practice sessions with my broken collarbone.

“I underestimated how difficult it would be, it was actually worse than Silverstone. So it was a nice surprise that when qualifying came around the bike was good and I didn’t feel too bad.

“As always it’s super close and we were towards the front of the group which meant I got a good start position for the first race.

“Fifth was the target for race one and was looking entirely possible, but with a few laps to go I really struggled with tyre wear and dropped back to eighth.”