Roads: Shiels takes a hat trick of wins at Skerries

Derek Shiels has narrowly missed out on a clean sweep of victories at this year’s Skerries 100 road races, after looking unstoppable in both superbike and supersport classes to take an impressive hat trick of wins on the Burrows Engineering Suzukis at the Country Dublin race.

In fact, he almost made it look easy in the big bike classes to power clear of runner-up Derek McGee in the opening encounter to take the chequered flag by a whopping 17 seconds – a feat he was able to build on in the second race to extend his margin over Micko Sweeny and Paul Jordan to win by 23 seconds.

Even light rain in the Grand Final race at the end of the day wasn’t enough to slow him down much, as he took the win there by 12 seconds from McGee, with home favourite Sweeny rounding out the podium places.

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However, McGee was able to get some revenge on him by taking a nail-biting supersport win from the Suzuki rider, clinching the win at the flag by a mere one hundredth of a second.

It was only in the Supertwins class where he suffered misfortune, with a mechanical problem ruling him out of contention and letting McGee take his second win of the day from Sweeny and Jordan.

Sheils spoke about his exploits afterwards: “It’s been a great day apart from the Supertwins breakdown. The Cookstown Burrows Engineering Suzuki GSXR 1000 Superbike went like a dream and in the three Superbike races I was not really under any pressure at any point. Conditions in the Grand Final were iffy but thankfully I was able to pull away at the front in the early stages and then just back off a little and maintain a good advantage.

“Although I didn’t win it, the Supersport 600 race was my most enjoyable experience of the day. Derek, Michael and I were together the whole time; I hope the fans enjoyed it as much as I did.”

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