Brookes' title aspirations dented at Silverstone
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01/01/1970
Unfortunately the first mechanic retirement for Tyco Suzuki and Josh Brookes in almost two seasons, put a disappointing halt on this year’s British Superbike title aspirations for the Northern Ireland based team, during the penultimate round at Silverstone yesterday.
Brookes took fifth place in the second encounter.
Obviously disappointed at seeing his 2013 British Superbike title bid come to an early conclusion, Josh Brookes – who is now 58 points behind series leader Shane Byrne – said: “I’m disappointed again. In practice and qualifying I had some chatter issues that didn’t really go away, although they certainly got better in the races, which is a positive.
“Our general package wasn’t just quite good enough to compete at the front this weekend. It has been before, but for whatever reason, we’ve either lost some pace or I’ve lost some form – or the other guys have just found extra performance from their machines.
“At the minute I just can’t match what I’ve been able to do in the past. Race one was out of my hands, but in race two the young Tyco Suzuki protégé wanted to get ahead of me, and fair play to him, but it created a gap and once you lose that draft on the front guys, then the race for the podium is over really.”
“We are obviously very disappointed to see out championship aspirations virtually come to an end for 2013 here at Silverstone today,” said team manager Philip Neill.
In summing up the penultimate round he added: “Although if I’m honest, I think we had a very steep hill to climb in terms of our championship hopes, with the damage having been done in previous rounds. It’s never nice to see them end with a ‘DNF’ for Josh, but we have to be realistic and say that we never really challenged the front-runners for pace all weekend.
“For whatever reason Josh seems to have lost some pace in recent rounds and it’s something we need to address before Brands Hatch, as we would still like to go out on a high. It’s been a long hard season for Josh and he’s had some fantastic races both in BSB and on his road racing debut this year on GSX-R machinery. Unfortunately we’ve fallen that little bit short with our championship challenge this year again. All we can do is re-group as a team and come back next year and go again.
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