‘Devastated’ Stafford’s toughest ride following tragedy of best friend

Ben Stafford faced his hardest challenge to date when returning to the track last weekend following the death of his best friend and long-time team-mate.

Malachi Mitchell-Thomas (20) died after a crash in the NW 200 races in Northern Ireland just seven days earlier.

Although clearly devastated by this, Stafford opted to get to Brands Hatch and keep the focus on the job in hand.

As a tribute to his pal, he had a helmet painted in the Malachi colours and logos by Phil Bradbury (www.warpaintuk.com). He will adopt this for the remainder of the season.

Stafford has not had a lot of luck at Brands and again struggled to get the bike set up. He qualified in a disappointing 19th place, albeit 0.896 of a second separating the top 20 places.
Stafford was again forced to use a stock engine and was clearly down on performance on this short sprint circuit.
An engine change at the end of Saturday gave a little gain in horse power but still way down on the competition and where he should be in this class.

In race one, the weather threatened and after a good start Stafford settled and worked on getting through the pack. But after a few laps the race was red-flagged and Stafford pitted to change the set-up. This would have favoured the Saracen’s Head rider’s technique as wet conditions are his strong point, but whilst in the pit lane a crack in the oil cooler water line was detected and it was game over.

So Stafford started Sunday’s 26-lap race from 25th position on the grid.
Again, he made a good start and moved up to 20th in lap two. He proceeded to move through the field, finally crossing the line in 14th place and in the points.

Team member and dad Andy Stafford said: “Massive thanks to Silicone and all of the private sponsors that help and a huge thanks to Phil for the unbelievable helmet design for a sadly missed friend.
“To sum up, again there are some massive positives – running a virtually stock engine in this class and with the thoughts of the week before make me even more proud of Ben at this time.”