TT 2017: ‘I was a bit lost on lap one’ – Hutchinson

Full report below from BSN

Ian Hutchinson fought his way from fourth place on the opening lap and saw off the significant challenge of Peter Hickman to claim his 15th TT win in Sunday afternoon’s Superbike race.

It was his first ‘big bike’ win since 2010 and gave him a hard fought 5.1s victory on the Tyco BMW. That, in turn, was Philip and Hector Neill’s first Superbike race win since Cameron Donald in 2008.

“It’s been the strangest practice week ever and we’ve all struggled for laps so seeing P4 on my first pit board wasn’t the ideal start,” Hutchinson said afterwards. “We’d made some small changes before the race and I was a bit lost on lap one, losing some time to the leaders. Dean (Harrison) was setting a great pace but the gaps were changing all the time and people were dropping out so I kept digging in and the digging in paid off.”

With limited practice time, Hutchinson didn’t take the lead until lap three and h’s fastest lap of the race came on the sixth and final lap with a speed of 130.738mph, which enabled him to pull away from Hickman.

With a lead over the similarly mounted BMW rider at one stage as high as ten seconds, the Smiths Racing rider had whittled it down to 1.6s at Ramsey on the final lap but Hutchinson’s prowess over the Mountain saw him edge ahead.

“Coming into the race, no-one knew what anyone else had in terms of pace and I didn’t have the bike to do what I wanted it to do in the first part of the race. There were yellow flags through Greeba Castle for about four laps and on the last lap, we caught a backmarker going though there who probably slowed more than what James (Hillier) and I did. The marshals and medics did a great job through the race to keep us going so a big thanks to them but when i saw my pitboard on the last lap showing how close Peter was, I had to get a shift on over the Mountain.

“Everyone gets traffic at different times though and it does balance itself out. We’d done a lot of work over the winter and during the week with our pit stops and the work paid off as we made up quite a bit of time at them. The team let me have a bike built to how I wanted it - essentially a Superstock bike with a Superbike engine - and the switch to Dunlops was my call so I’m delighted to get another Superbike win.”

Image source: Impact Images