Bridewell’s efforts are repaid with points in the final race of a challenging Estoril WorldSBK round

Superbike Advocates Racing and rider Tommy Bridewell complete a rather tough penultimate WorldSBK round at Estoril Circuit on a high note, banking five hard-earned and very well-deserved points in the final race of the weekend.

The third and final day of action began with a short warm-up, which SBK rookie Tommy exploited as far as possible as he prepared for the day’s races with the support of his technicians. Based on Saturday’s qualifying result, he lined up on the sixth row of the grid for the morning’s Superpole sprint, which ran at 11.10am local time (CET-1) in dry, cloudy conditions. Making a strong start and immediately able to establish good pace, Tommy was lying thirteenth by the end of the opening lap. Right in the thick of the chasing group, the British rider focused on maintaining a consistently fast pace, which allowed him to make up a position in the final stages to close P12.

Race 2 rounded out the Portuguese round, running mid-afternoon in conditions that fortunately remained dry, despite rain showers a short time before. Lining up for this final race of the weekend on row seven, Bridewell was quick to react when the lights went out, immediately making up two positions. With the points zone well within his sights, Tommy pushed on to progress to fifteenth by lap nine. Sensing that he had more in the tank, Bridewell focused on his pace and systematically gained another four positions through the central phase. A determined Tommy came within half a second of tenth-placed Dixon but was not quite able to pass him on the final lap, meaning that a valiant Tommy crossed the line eleventh to score five very well-deserved championship points.

At the end of this penultimate championship round, Bridewell continues to lie fifteenth in the general standings with a tally of 71 points. Superbike Advocates Racing will travel directly on to Spain’s Jerez Circuit, where the WorldSBK season finale will take place next weekend (16-18 October).

Tommy Bridewell (Superbike Advocates Racing #46)
“A strong end to a challenging weekend. I think I didn’t anticipate quite how complex and difficult this circuit is to learn fully. Sometimes it’s not so hard to learn a track, but when you have to do that while also trying to find the pace to run where we expect to be in WorldSBK it’s more complicated. So, it’s certainly been a challenge but in today’s two races we made some changes to the bike that allowed me to ride better and find flow around the track. I think we could have run somewhere around the top six had it not been for our starting position; you can only do so much in such a competitive field from nineteenth on the grid. So, a fairly positive end, and now we’ll see what we can do next weekend at the last Jerez round.”