Welkom, Free State - Reigning SA Superbike champion Clint Seller (Kawasaki ZX-10R) pulled off a superb double in Round 7 of the inaugural SuperGP series on Sunday at Phakisa, moving closer to claiming the title with only one round remaining.
Starting from pole, Seller won the first of two 16-lap races on the 4.24km Grand Prix circuit by just 0.540sec from Lance Isaacs (BMW S1000RR) with Dylan White a distant third, 12.184sec in arrears.
Then he walked away from Kawasaki team-mate White to win the second race by more than six seconds with Isaacs, battling with worn tyres, a distant third, 13 seconds in arrears.
That took Seller's total for the season to 10 wins from 14 starts and gave him a 24 point lead over Isaacs with a maximum of 50 on offer at the final round in November.
SUPER600
Steven Odendaal (Kawasaki ZX-6R) became the first South African Super600 champion when he did the double, coming in ahead of 2013 SA Supersport champion Cameron Petersen (Yamaha R6) and Darryn Binder (Suzuki GSX-R600) in Race 1.
The 14-lap race was red-flagged twice and ended up being run in two parts, an initial five-lapper followed by a nine-lapper. Dylan Barnard (Yamaha R6) went down on lap six and the race was halted to allow the marshals to remove his bike from the middle of the circuit.
The grid lined up for the restart in the order at the end of lap five: Odendaal, Petersen, Binder, Dean Vos (Yamaha R6), Mathew Scholtz and Michael White (Kawasaki ZX-6R).
The second red flag came out with five of the remaining nine laps to go when Vos went down and crawled painfully off the tarmac. With 75 percent of the race distance completed, it was decided to end the race. Scholtz was fourth ahead of Vos and White.
Odendaal then edged out team-mate Scholtz by two tenths of a second in an Race 2 battle that saw the lead change five times in the final two laps as the pair battled it out not only for the race win, but also the championship.
Third was Nicholas Kershaw (Kawasaki ZX-6R).
With just one round and two races remaining in the series, at RedStar Raceway in Mpumalanga on 30 November 30, Odendaal - with nine race wins from 14 starts - has 306 points to Scholtz' 229, a lead of 77 with only 50 points still available.
SUPER M
Nicolas Grobler, who scored two seconds in the opening round of SuperGP at Phakisa in March aboard a BMW S1000RR, made a triumphant return to the new-look national motorcycle tour on a limited-edition BMW HP4 (which isn't eligible under Evo rules for SuperGP) in the SuperM national challenge, taking pole position for the first of Sunday's two 25-minute races ahead of Challenge leader Kyle Robinson (Kawasaki ZX-10R) and Beau Levey (KTM RC8).
Grobler romped home to 7.644sec win from Levey and Robinson, with the latter clinching the inaugural Challenge title in the process. Darien Kayser was again quickest of the 600 riders on his Kawasaki ZX-6R, but was forced out with technical problems.
It was a different story in Race 2, with Grobler, running on worn rubber, struggling to match the pace of Robinson on new tyres. The new champion wrapped up a successful day's racing, held in warm and sunny conditions with a light breeze providing some relief from high temperatures, by leading from start to finish, coming home 0.805sec ahead of Grobler.
Third was Levey, a distant 19.882sec behind the winner, with lone female rider Janine Davies (BMW S1000RR) coming through the field from seventh on the grid to finish fourth ahead of Justin Gillesen (Kawasaki ZX-10R), who she caught and passed on the last lap, and Kayser.