Peter Hickman was left to wonder what might have been in Monday evening’s Supersport TT race with the Trooper Beer by Smiths Racing Triumph rider set to mount a charge in the second half of the race before it was stopped early due to rain.

In his now customary manner, the 32-year old was down in seventh at Glen Helen on the opening lap but had worked his way up to third by the end of the second lap to lie just five seconds behind race leader, and ultimate winner, Lee Johnston.

“A podium at the TT’s never a bad thing but with only a handful of laps in practice on the bike, it took me a while to get into the race and I was down in P7 at the end of the first sector," Hickman said later.

"I picked the pace up quite a bit on lap two and having worked my way up to third, I was really looking forward to the last two laps.”

However, with the rain falling on the west part of the island, Hickman was denied the opportunity of, potentially, taking his first Supersport win around the Mountain Course although his second lap of 126.744mph was the second quickest of the race as he closed to within 1.4s of runner up James Hillier.

“I caught John McGuinness on the approach to Kirk Michael and there was rain coming down in the middle of the village so I rolled off quite a bit.

By the time we got to the jump at Rhencullen it had cleared but it lost me a good few seconds although I got back into my rhythm pretty quickly.”

“The bike’s a lot stronger this year and it looked like being another close Supersport race so it was a shame the rain came but the organisers made the right call.

"Having missed the first night’s practice when we were at Donington Park, the rest of the riders got four or five laps on the Supersport machine so we were playing catch up from that moment on but I rode as hard as I could and we weren’t far off at all so I’m happy with another podium.”