DANNY Buchan lost his unbeaten record but increased his Pirelli National Superstock 1000cc series championship lead.

The Burnham-on-Crouch rider extended the gap at the top of the series leaderboard to 17 points at the weekend, after securing second place in the two-part race contested over two six laps tours of the Snetterton circuit, in Norfolk.

At the start of the race, Buchan went wide at Montreal, allowing several riders to overtake, but on lap two he regained the lead from Adam Jenkinson, with Jason O’Halloran and Hudson Kennaugh close behind.

Buchan, by lap three, had opened a gap of half a second over Jenkinson.

At this point James Egan crashed, along with Conor Cummins, at Palmer, bringing out the yellow flags.

The safety car was deployed for six laps until the race was red-flagged to allow the oil spill from Ashley Beech’s engine failure to be cleaned up.

The re-start turned into a six lap sprint with Buchan in pole position but in an attempt to avoid the cleaned up oil spill he allowed Kennaugh to pass just before the Bentley straight and in doing so the Linxcel Trik Moto racing BMW rider set a new lap record.

The two protagonists now had a two-second lead over the following pack, with Lee Jackson in fifth closing the gap on the riders ahead setting a new lap record of 1:50.930 in the process.

Buchan was still in second place on the last lap and in a final effort to catch the leader broke the lap record set by Jackson a few seconds earlier in a time of 1:50.668 sec/96.57 mph.

But a determined performance from Kennaugh, last year’s champion, was enough to see him take his first win of the year by 0.890s with Buchan in second and Filip Backlund third.