Guintoli looks forward to Silverstone’s open spaces

The MCE British Superbike Championship reaches its penultimate round this weekend at Silverstone and for Sylvain Guintoli it’s another step on his journey back from injury and yet another case of learning a track from scratch.

The Worx Suzuki rider got his first view of the circuit last week when he did a track day there and said: “I’m looking forward to this weekend. We visited the track last week on a track day so I could do the first stage of familiarization.

“After Cadwell Park and Croft it’s like returning to MotoGP, being that the track is so wide and in places so fast – and of course it is a former GP track.

“The layout certainly creates some challenges. The first half of the lap is fast and flowing – which I can see me and the Suzuki enjoying – but after that it gets twistier and twistier until you almost come to a stop at the final chicane.

“That bit isn’t so easy to like and it will be hard to race as well as it makes overtakes risky. We’ll see.”

Guintoli clearly wasn’t at his best at Croft – with the bumpy circuit really taking a toll on his injured leg – and team boss Jack Valentine underlined that when he talked about the teams aspirations for this weekend at Silverstone.

He said: “While we’ve still got high hopes, we must remain realistic and acknowledge we are in comeback mode at this time.

“And the most important news we’ve received this past week is that x-rays revealed no injury to Sylvain’s leg from his two Croft crashes, and in fact his leg continues to heal with every passing day.

“I can, though, see Sylvain liking this track as there are plenty of elements of the design which are GP-spec – I think there’s potential for him to do well here.

“But our goals should be for Sylvain to get dialled into the circuit, to progress with his set-up and improve his lap times in preparation for next year.

“Being that we love to race we can’t deny a good result would still be great.”