Jake Dixon’s hopes of back-to-back MotoGP Moto2 Silverstone wins were dashed on Sunday.

Dover racer Dixon, who won the British round last season with Aspar Team, could only finish 11th for Elf Marc VDS Racing.

The tone was set after a disappointing qualifying time of 2min03.838sec saw Dixon only 13th-fastest on home soil, and although he improved in the race to cross the line in ninth, a three-second penalty after an earlier incident with Spain’s Ivan Ortola demoted him two places.

Australia’s Senna Agius won the race while Dixon’s teammate, Filip Salac, was seventh. Dixon remains third in the standings, on 82 points - 29 behind leader Manuel Gonzalez.

“It’s been a difficult weekend,” Dixon admitted. “The race didn’t pan out as I wanted.

“I was getting overtaken by a lot of riders and didn’t really have a response. When I was in free air, I was pretty quick. That’s obviously frustrating. But there are positives that we can take and a few things we can work on now to improve for the next few races to try and get us back to the front.”

Dixon’s weekend did end on a positive note, however, with the rider wearing a specially-designed helmet in support of former Superbike World Champion Sylvain Guintoli’s son, Luca, who was diagnosed with cancer last year.

The helmet, a one-off design which features Luca’s handprints, is up for grabs in a raffle with funds raised going to charity.

“The main thing this weekend didn’t come in the race,” Dixon added. “It was doing the special helmet livery for little Luca and the Guintoli family to try and raise as much money as possible for the charity of their choice.

“We’ve raised a lot of money and hopefully we can get the number raised to over £50,000 before the raffle ends.

“It’s going to a great cause and we’ll have something else going into the raffle.”

The season continues in Aragon, Spain, on June 6-8.