ASBK Supersport 300 Turn One Crash Carnage

Yamaha Motorcycle Insurance Australian Superbike Championship 2017
Round Three – Winton Motor Raceway – April 28-30

2017 ASBK content brought to you by Dunlop Motorcycle Tyres

ASBK Supersport 300 Turn One Carnage

Images by Andrew Gosling

Supersport 300 Race One

The eight-lap opening stanza for the 300 Supersport competitors got underway at 1520 this afternoon but no sooner had it started than a number of riders went down at the first turn bringing the red flag out to halt proceedings as the carnage was cleared up. The fallers, who all looked to be okay, included front runners Jack Passfield, Hunter Ford, Tommy Edwards and Billy Van Eerde.

At the re-start, less than ten minutes after the red flag incident, it was KTM RC390 mounted Max Croker quickest out of the blocks ahead of Jack Mahaffy (Yamaha) and pole-sitter Oli Bayliss (Kawasaki). Croker put in a 1m37.658 from a standing start on that first lap, by the end of which he had seven-tenths of a second over his combatants.

By halfway around the second lap however things had closed up considerably, Bayliss had put in a 1m32.462 to close right onto the tail of Croker, Mahaffy also right there in the hunt for the lead, as that trio started to break away from the rest of the pack.

Croker still held the lead with three laps to run, but could not shake Bayliss or Mahaffy, that pair sticking to the tail of the KTM like glue. The timing system was crediting Oli Bayliss with the best speed on the straight, clocking 163km/h.

Bayliss and Croker then went down with two laps to go, with the only thing seemingly injured their pride, and championship points standings… That clash left Jack Mahaffy all by himself at the front of the field, with a six-second buffer over Scott Nicholson and Zac Levy.

Jack Mahaffy - Image by TBG — Jack Mahaffy – Image by TBG

Jack Mahaffy went on to take a clear victory while Zac Levy and Scott Nicholson rounded out the podium. Nicholson was the first Under 300cc competitor home.

The Supersport 300 category includes two-categories, an U300 class for machines such as the parellel-twin Kawasaki Ninja 300 that displace less than the 300cc in capacity, and O300 class for machines between 300 and 400cc in capacity such as Yamaha’s twin-cylinder YZF-R3 and KTM’s single-cylinder RC390.