Benelli’s press releases from last weekend’s World Superbike race at Brands Hatch:

Friday:
Technical problems hit the Benelli in first qualifying. Minor technical problems held Peter Goddard and the Benelli Tornado back this afternoon in first qualifying for the European round of the World Superbike Championship at Brands Hatch. The team had two bikes set up differently to try out contrasting settings. Unfortunately the bike that turned out to have the best set-up was the one that developed the problems, forcing Goddard to go out on the second bike with his qualifying tyre as the session drew to a close.

“The motor let us down on the number one bike,” explained Goddard. “The gearing and suspension were wrong on the number two bike – so I wasted my qualifying tyre.”

The team, still in its maiden World Superbike season, have had very little time since the bikes returned home from Laguna Seca. “There’s only really been time for basic maintenance work,” said Goddard, “rather than any major changes.” Despite the teething problems Goddard is enjoying riding the new Benelli, “The great thing about it is that it works really well straight out of the box, wherever we take it. It handles well and it’s a great bike to ride, but we need to work on getting the power up and the weight down.”

Benelli Sport Team manager Max Zani echoed Goddard’s sentiments; “Technical problems have halted our progress today. But we are already working on the bikes and tomorrow we will have both Tornados set up properly and hopefully we’ll have sorted the problems we experienced on the number one machine.”

Goddard said that with the bike set up right he was confident that he could get higher up the time sheet, “I think I can get up to at least 20th in qualifying and even higher in the race.” Circuit knowledge is all-important at Brands Hatch and Goddard has an advantage over some riders there. He’s ridden at Brands many times before in both the World and the British Superbike championships. “I love the track,” said Goddard, “Although there are still a couple of places where the barriers are too close for comfort, Brands is a rider’s circuit and a lot of fun to race on.”

Peter Goddard and the Benelli Tornado finished today’s timed qualifying in 27th position, with a time of 1:29.355.

Saturday:
Benelli Sport on a steep learning curve at Brands Hatch. The Benelli Sport racing team entered the World Superbike Championship to develop the brand new Tornado Superbike. They knew it would be tough and they knew that racing would bring many valuable, and tough, lessons. It’s proved to be every bit as hard as they expected and at each round the team have been given plenty of lessons. After the elation of scoring their first World Superbike Championship point at the last round in Laguna Seca the team have been returned to reality as niggling reliability problems blocked rider Peter Goddard’s efforts to qualify for the Superpole. The team ended up 27th on the time sheet after final qualifying.

“We’ve been experiencing problems that we hadn’t expected,” commented team owner Andrea Merloni. “But we came to Superbike racing for experience and that’s exactly what we’ve been getting. Some of the problems we’ve had this weekend have been unexpected, and we will have lots of work to do after this weekend. But we are achieving exactly what we came here to do, but I hope we can score more points on Sunday.”

Peter Goddard was upbeat about his chances in the race, “The aim tomorrow is to finish and score some more championship points,” he said. “Our lap times on race tyres here have been almost as fast as when we put the qualifying tyres on, so that’s encouraging for tomorrow. We have a good base setting for the Benelli now and we haven’t had to make too many changes from the set-up we ran at Laguna. This weekend our problem has been engine reliability. I had an engine failure in both qualifying sessions which cost us track time, and that’s important with a new bike. The bikes are running consistently high rpm at this track so it’s hard on the engines around here. There is also a lot of hard braking. Hopefully we have better reliability in the races because everything else is working well. Since we first raced the bike at Misano there hasn’t been a lot of time for development, especially with the travel getting to America and back. After this weekend there’s a longer break so we are looking forward to trying some new things later in the season to keep improving. I think we can work our way forward in the races tomorrow, like we did at Laguna, and hopefully we can be in the points. As usual British wildcard riders are going fast on their ‘home’ track so if we get in the points it will be a very good result. The weather has been hot and the track is a little more slippery than usual.”

Final qualifying result:
Grid Position 27. Peter Goddard (Australia) Benelli Sport Tornado, 1:28.896

Sunday:
Benelli Sport add to the World Superbike Championship points tally.

The Benelli Tornado Superbike took one more step forward this weekend when Peter Goddard finished 13th in the first race at Brands Hatch. Peter Goddard had a brilliant ride in the first race to score three more Superbike World Championship points.

The team had struggled with niggling technical problems all weekend, which had hampered their progress in qualifying. Despite starting from back on the seventh row, Goddard had made great progress when race one was red-flagged after an incident involving Wild Card rider James Haydon. Goddard was up in 16th when the race was stopped.

“When they stopped the race it helped me because it meant I was on the fourth row for the restart,” said Goddard, “That made things a lot better than being on the seventh row after qualifying.”

At the end of the race Goddard was having a great dice with factory Honda rider Tady Okada and actually beat the ex-GP rider on the track. But Okada had done just enough to win the battle on aggregate time and took 12th position in the results.

In the second race Goddard again had a chance to try the Benelli Tornado out in close quarters with other riders.

“I got into some close racing with other bikes,” said Goddard, “and it’s valuable for us to be able to compare the Benelli with them in these situations. In race trim we’re a lot closer to the others than we seem to be in qualifying. The bike handles really well and it’s fun to ride. Right now our priority is finding more acceleration and horsepower, but engine development is not a simple thing. I’ll be staying in Europe for the Summer break until we start racing again. We’re hoping to do some more testing.” Goddard finished race two just outside the points in 16th position.

Team owner Andrea Merloni was delighted with the weekend’s achievements. “I am very happy!” he said. “Qualifying wasn’t easy, we had so many problems. But we got them all sorted in time for the race and Peter Goddard scored more championship points for Benelli. Now we have to go home and try to work out fixes to the problems. We managed to work around them here in Brands Hatch but our intention is to work out proper engineering and technical solutions. We have a month before the next race but we also have to give the team a holiday, they have worked so hard and they deserve a rest.”

The Benelli Tornado will race again in the World Superbike Championship at Oschersleben on September 2nd.