It was a stone jammed in the train that meant Shaun Simpson had to retire from the second Nations race on Sunday. The second time in three years a chain issue has taken his KTM out of the Nations!
He said: “It was nice to have a great first race and if I could have passed Van Horebeek then I feel I could have gone a bit. I felt like I was riding well and my lap-times were coming down all the time. The second race was a wrench. I had the outside gate pick, which I couldn’t complain about too much because there were hole-shots coming from there all weekend, but I never made it work for me. I made a few good moves in the first turns but then [Pritt] Ratsep went down in front of me and I got tangled up with him. I was outside the top thirty and managed to get up to outside the top twenty after two laps and I felt strong and I could have charged on. I knew the track and was moving forward but it was all in vein when the chain came off; the second time in three years. Bit of a shame really to finish the weekend on a bum note. I’ll try and take the positives and I don’t think it would have changed the outlook much for Team GB.”
His team boss Steve Turner said: “It was gutting for him to have a DNF in the second race for such an unlucky incident. It looks like a rock has gone in his sprocket and thrown the chain off. We always run case-savers on the bikes to stop the chain smashing the engine casings but the force actually broke the case-saver which in-turn damaged the slave cylinder, leaving him with no clutch. It’s a crappy way to finish the season but there’s nothing else that we could have done to prevent something like this happening. We’re proud to use Tsubaki chains which in our opinion are the best you can use and we already rivet the chains instead of using split links to prevent any possibility of a failure in that area but sometimes the gods are against you and you just have to accept that. In the end it actually made no difference. Even if Shaun had won the last race we still would have finished 7th.”