Dunlop lays down huge marker on first day of North West 200
Michael Dunlop has laid down a massive marker to his rivals on the first day of the 2025 international road racing season by taking a double victory at the North West 200
Michael Dunlop has laid down a massive marker to his rivals on the first day of the 2025 international road racing season by taking a double victory at the North West 200.
Dunlop won both the supersport and superstock classes at the Northern Irish race, as pre-race favourite Davey Todd was forced to simply settle for his first-ever superbike class win at the event.
It looked like it would be Todd’s day following qualifying, with the reigning Senior TT champion starting all three races from the front row - and he didn’t disappoint in the opening race of the night.
Leading almost from start to finish despite the best efforts of Dean Harrison, Todd was able to hold him off until the end to take a close but comfortable win of 0.2 seconds, with his team-mate and 8Ten Racing co-owner Peter Hickman similarly holding off Dunlop for the final podium spot.
“A Superbike win is the one that’s been eluding me for quite a while, so to finally get it done is really special, especially with Pete on the podium as well,” Todd said afterwards.
“The team’s been set up in the space of about eight weeks, so a massive shout out to all the boys and the sponsors for making it happen and they’ve pulled it out of the bag.
“I’ve been struggling to get off the line with the bike, which is unlike me as that’s normally one of my strengths, but I nailed it in the race, which is when it counts. I wanted to lead from the front, so I set a steady pace and was ready to push harder at the end if need be.”
However, his run of luck wasn’t to continue into the supersport class, and it was Dunlop who was able to instead charge through the pack in the high-speed slipstream battle to take his maiden Ducati win and his first at the North West in nearly a decade.
Battling against Todd and class specialist Richard Cooper for most of the four-lap race around the seven-mile circuit, it was the latter who pushed him hardest, but eventually Dunlop was able to break clear on the run along the Antrim coast to the chequered flag, taking the win by nearly half a second with Todd only 0.1s behind Cooper.
“We struggled a bit with the bike at the beginning of the week,” he explained afterwards, “and there’s still more to come from it but having been on the wrong end of things in the past I pulled my finger out to make sure I was in the right place at the right time this time around.
“The slipstream here means you can pull people back with a couple of good sectors. I was strong in the second half of the race, which I needed to be as Davey and Richard are good riders and on good bikes.”
In the final superstock race of the night, it once again looked like it would be Todd standing on the top step of the podium until a mistake at University corner saw him running wide while comfortably in the lead.
Conceding the position to Dunlop and Harrison, it left the Northern Irishman to pull clear at the front and take the most comfortable win of the night’s three races, with Todd forced to settle for fourth behind an impressive performance from Ian Hutchinson.
Scoring a podium on Moto3 team MLav Racing’s road racing debut and stepping onto the podium for the first time in 2017, the race marks a return to road racing success for Hutchinson after a difficult few years that saw the former five-in-a-week TT winner forced to recover from a life-threatening stroke.
Racing action continues at the North West 200 on Saturday with a six-race calendar that sees superbikes, supersport and superstock all lining up again as well as being joined by the supertwin class.
