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Race24 Home -> Race24 Message BoardRe: GMT94 1st, BMW 2nd, SERT 3rd and 2011 World Champions
Posted by Mike's Diary  on November 14, 2011, 1:54 pm, in reply to "GMT94 1st, BMW 2nd, SERT 3rd and 2011 World Champions"
82.32.48.184
A bit more info:
The race was shaping up as a major high speed battle like Le Mans until the BMW/YART crash. Word was that it came at the end of a lap where they had swapped places 'up to 9 times'. How true this quote is I'm not sure but it would appear that the sort of riding that riders love and endurance team managers dread was going on! Anyway, it transformed the race into a fairly slow tactical affair. GMT94, having been plagued by terrible luck for most of the year suddenly had the victory dropped on plate in front of them and did enough to prevent BMW from catching them. SERT did enough with their one remaining bike and 2 riders to win the championship. YART fought back well but appeared to settle for 4th in the latter stages. It was clear that TT Legends, Bolliger, Folch and Maco could not affect the top 4 outcome and would finish in that order barring problems. That left BMW as the only team with real incentive to go fast and they did that in spades! With half an hour to go Nigon was lapping almost as fast as the pole time on race tyres at night! GMT speeded up about a second a lap to counter this heroic effort and kept themselves just enough time in hand to do one last splash and dash with 10 mins to go. I think they could have got away with not stopping if they had been forced to. In the end they won the race by about 30secs and BMW lost the championship by the same amount!
There was a sub plot in the last hour as Bolly pitted with fuel starvation problems. It took so long to diagnose and fix a broken connection to the fuel pump that they dropped to 11th, allowing TT Legends up to 7th in the championship. If they had caught R2CL for 10th, Folch had caught TT Legends or someone in between had dropped out it would have put Bolly back up to 7th but none of those things occurred, although the Maco bike was extremely slow and sounding terrible with no first or second gear for the last 4 or so laps.
TT Legends also lost a rider before the race started. Cam Donald broke his hand the day before flying to Doha. No Honda TT rider could be found to replace him at such short notice so another ex-Phase One stalwart was drafted in - Glen Richards. The race was uneventful for us, the Combined ABS system worked perfectly again and we did the longest rotas again, despite still running undersize tanks.
Three cheers for the FIM web people (again!)- they missed out adding SERTs 19 points so BMW are showing as world champions! I assume this is a mistake, not a post race disqualification as they were anounced as champs at the prize giving the next day and are still shown as 3rd in the race result!
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