Rory Skinner is determined to bounce back from a tough weekend last time out at the TT Circuit Assen when the Cheshire Mouldings Yamaha rider had a dramatic start to Sunday’s raceday.
Skinner had come off the back of his first dry race win at Cadwell Park and was feeling optimistic ahead of the opening races of the Showdown, but following a solid sixth place in race one, his weekend took a dramatic turn in race two.
A technical problem left the Scottish contender crashing out of the warm up lap, and then a race against time for the team to repair the damage ready for the final race. However, after fighting from the back of the grid through to seventh, he is now ready to bounce back at Donington Park.
Skinner said: “It was a tough weekend at Assen; we had come off of a good weekend at Cadwell Park with my first dry race win. A couple of crashes meant that the parts that we usually run throughout the course of the year were damaged, so the bike at Assen was a slightly different spec to what we ran all season, so we basically had to try and develop the bike through the weekend.
“There were just some areas that we seemed to struggle and we couldn’t really make the bike work as it has this year. So it was a bit of a tough one, and obviously the incident in race two on Sunday, with the oil pipe problem, really derailed our weekend, but the boys did a great job to get the bike back together so quickly and to get it to a point I could ride it was amazing.
“And that last race where I started 23rd on the grid and finished seventh on a bike, which turned better left than right was definitely a highlight of the weekend for me. We’ve showed resilience this year and have bounced back when things have been tough and we’re still getting the job done. Not the results I wanted at Assen with a sixth and a seventh, but given the circumstances, not bad at all.
“So we go again at Donington Park this weekend, really looking forward to going back there and we’ve made some good steps with the bike compared to where we were at the start of the year, so we’ll go from there and see where we end up.”