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Superbike Championship stars Keith Farmer and Jack Kennedy take top spots at Cadwell Park
By Michelle Johnson | 21 August 2017 | Sport
Superbike star Jack on how he approaches his rivalry with Supersport Doubles title Keith
Keith Farmer and Jack Kennedy went head to head at Cadwell Park on Sunday as they fought for first place in the latest Superbike Championships. The race was fraught with action as two crashes and technical issues galore plagued riders. Appleyard Macadams’ Keith came in first place, obtaining the Dickies British Supersport double, while Jack, racing for the Tempus-sponsored MV Agusta team, achieved second place after beating a weekend’s worth of technical issues.
“Nobody wants technical issues, you can really lose your momentum and you need to be moving forward every session so any time lost on track is not good. We missed morning warm up due to another engine problem so we had to go straight into the race not really knowing what it was going to be like.
”I had every faith in the team that they had given me a bike I could challenge on,” second-place Jack exclusively tells Tempus, praising his team. “The lads never stopped working on the bike, it was a tough weekend on them too so it's great to reward them with a podium finish.”
Despite a poor start – with Jack starting on the front row of the grid only to get pulled back into seventh position – the Dublin-born motoring star managed to pick his way to the front runners by lap four, despite Halsall Yamaha’s Joe Francis’ dramatic crash, which brought out the safety cars.
Three laps later, second-place driver Andrew Irwin, driving for Carrick, took a high side causing riders to take evasive action to avoid him, seeing Keith take a comfortable lead. Jack and Ben Currie were left to battle it out for the runner up spots, with Ben ultimately coming in third place.
“I approach every race the same, I go out to win, nothing less and that's all I focus on,” says Jack. “I'm hoping we've got all our bad luck out of the way now with the bike and we can just concentrate on winning races for the rest of the season. There are four rounds left in the championship with Keith in a 63-point lead over me and 200 points up for grabs. Our aim is to beat Keith in every race possible to bridge that gap and claw back as many points as we can.”
Image © Barney / Steve Thomas (top), and © Aaron Scott (above)