Sam Burman has contested the penultimate round of the Monster Energy Motostar British Championship season held at Silverstone, home of the British F1 Grand Prix and MotoGP. Once again she improved her pace all weekend whilst developing new suspension, finishing Sunday’s race in 22nd position.
Following the news that loyal sponsor, WNT, would continue their support into the 2014 season, Sam and her WNT Burman Racing team decided to invest in new Ohlins suspension immediately as this has been an area where Sam felt there was room for improvement, the idea being to develop a good feeling with the new suspension during the final two rounds of this season.
With the new components only collected a couple of days before leaving for Silverstone, Sam would ideally need a dry track to test the settings for the first time. Unfortunately most of the Friday was lost in terms of quality track time due to persistent light rain falling, although conditions did improve slightly during the afternoon. Sam had wet weather tyres in the bike for both sessions completing 14 laps of the vast 3.66 mile Grand Prix circuit.
The weather had improved further for Saturday morning’s opening timed qualifying, with the circuit mainly dry with just one or two damp patches. Running her new ohlins suspension for the first time in dry conditions, Sam felt good and was pleased with the front end feel of the bike. She identified where some adjustments were needed to the rear suspension and admitted to being a little cautious on a circuit not overly familiar to her.
Sam improved by over two seconds during final qualifying, setting a new personal best lap time of 2 minutes 28.301 seconds whilst benefitting from riding within a group. She had hoped to improve further during the latter stages but found herself circulating on her own and was a little disappointed to end up in 21st place on the grid having shown potential for an even quicker time early in the session.
Morning warm up on race day went well for Sam; she equalled her best time from the previous afternoon but this time riding on her own and completed the short session in 15th place.
Due to an incident in an earlier race the timetable was revised slightly and the Motostar race was reduced to eight laps in total. Sam made one of her trademark good starts and made up two positions on the opening lap. For the majority of the race she impressively set times under her qualifying time whilst chasing a group of riders ahead, setting a new personal best time of two minutes 27.272 seconds on lap three whilst running in 19th position. During the final few laps Sam was caught by the following group and a small miscalculation of laps remaining denied her an opportunity to regain a position with her ending up in 22nd place at the chequered flag.
“We used this meeting largely to test our new ohlins suspension and I’m happy with the progress we made; I would like to thank KAIS for all their help with the settings. I’m looking forward to seeing how it will work at Brands Hatch which is one of my favourite circuits in a couple of week’s time.” Sam Burman By Martin Knighton
