The 2016 New Zealand Superbike Championship series was given a massive shake-up at Invercargill’s Teretonga Park at the weekend.
Wellington’s Sloan Frost had finished the day unbeaten in the glamour superbike class at round one in Christchurch a week ago, but he was forced to scramble to protect his position when two of his rivals stepped up to dominate the day at Teretonga Park Raceway on Saturday and Sunday.
Thanks to his superb hat-trick of wins at Christchurch’s Ruapuna Park circuit the previous weekend, 34-year-old Frost enjoyed a 16-point advantage as he arrived at the Invercargill circuit.
But he was given a wake-up call when Scott Moir and Andrew Stroud both rose to the challenge and signalled their own title bids.
However, even though Moir was the top superbike class rider for the weekend Frost salvaged his weekend and still managed to extend his overall championship lead.
Frost finished Invercargill round races third, third and first, making it a Suzuki clean sweep for the weekend. With a bonus point for being fastest qualifier in the class, he now enjoys a 31-point advantage over the new No 2 ranked rider in the series, 48-year-old father-of-10 Stroud.
Christchurch’s John Ross was always in winning contention all weekend, but his fourth, fourth and third results saw him slip from second to third in the overall standings.
Nine-time former national superbike champion Stroud, who returned to the racetrack this season after a two-year hiatus, showed he was still capable of winning races and it is certainly not an impossible dream for him to believe that he can overturn that 31-point deficit in the two rounds that remain.
The big mover in the class was Moir, who experienced a difficult weekend at Ruapuna but celebrated a dream run at Teretonga and heroically elevated himself from a distant eighth overall after round one to fourth in the standings.
“This is not the first time I’ve won a round at the nationals … I did it too at Taupo in 2014, but this is right up there with that,” Moir said.
“After I won the first race of the weekend on Saturday, it gave me a lot of confidence. In the second race [on Sunday], I just put my head down and didn’t look back. But I made a mistake on the last lap and left a gap for Andrew [Stroud] to slip past. I learned a lesson from that and vowed not to leave the door open again.
“I led most of race three, but Sloan [Frost] found a way past. managed to hang on to him, but, in the end, I just settled for good points and it was enough for me to win the day.
“I’m in a good position in the championship now and anything can happen from here on. If I hadn’t crashed and DNFed one of my races at Ruapuna, who knows where I might have been in the standings now.”
It was a similar story in the supersport 600cc class where Glen Eden’s Daniel Mettam topped the class at Teretonga with his third-race fight-back from 14th to fifth an inspirational one.
Christchurch’s Cameron Hudson did enough in finishing third, third, and first to keep himself top of the series standings.
The four-round championship now heads to Levels Raceway, near Timaru, next weekend.
