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Thierry Van Den Bosch Leads World Championship, Davide Gozzini Second (Mar 14, 2010)
The second round of the FIM Supermoto World Championship, the Grand Prix of Great Britain, was held at Mallory Park in conjunction with the seventh round of the Motocross World Championship. Given the number of participants for this round the format for the Saturday evening race schedule would see both the S1 and S2 classes combined over two heats, with the capacity classes scored separately.
The official practice sessions on Friday started in the worst way possible for TM Racing with the fall of the young rider Andrea Occhini who was left with a bad fracture in his left wrist.
Van den Bosch and Gozzini were second and third respectively in timed practice whilst the young Italian rider Alex Serafini was eleventh in the S1 class.
In race one Van Den Bosch took full advantage of his first row start position and was immediately in second behind Chareyre, followed closely by Lazzarini and Gozzini. After a few laps Thierry took the lead and went on to win the heat outright with a huge distance between his nearest S1class rivals while Gozzini, struggling with conditions on the 'big' 660 SMX, finished fourth, second in S2 class.
In race two both the TM riders, Van Den Bosch and Gozzini, had left themselves with work to do after contact with other riders in the first turn. They placed themselves into fifth and sixth positions in lap one but it was Gozzini and his TM 660 SMX who seemed to be more competitive, within a few laps Gozzini had passed into third place, setting the fastest recorded lap time also. Davide finished the race in third place (second in S2 class) but slowed by Lazzarini, who was not fighting with him in class ranking, he was unable to take the fight to Chareyre. Van Den Bosch failed to be as fast as race one and settled for fourth position, second in S1 class, tied on points with Lazzarini for the event but still retaining the red plate, indicating his world championship leading status and by a good points margin, young Serafini conluded both races in tenth place in the S1 class.
Van Den Bosch commented: "....in race one I immediately found the right speed and I won the race without problems, whilst in the second race i prefer not to take any uneccessary risks and think more to the championship than to the single heat, the track was difficult and a mistake here could cost too much....."
Gozzini commented: "....in the first race i struggled, the bike was nervous on the difficult track, in the second race i chose a different ignition map which softened the power delivery and then i was really strong, its a pity that Lazzarini slowed me otherwise I would have taken even Chareyre...."
The next race for the TM team is the fourth round of the Italian Supermoto Championship to be held in Viterbo on 7th June.