Faulty front tyre hampers Brookes’ qualifying

Josh Brookes rebounded from a forgettable qualifying session to score the second fastest time of morning warm up with a 45.586.

Brookes missed out on the final knockout session of qualifying yesterday and will start Race 1 on his Relentless Suzuki by TAS from the fourth row, in 13th place. Brookes said the team had found a good base setting before qualifying and went a little firmer for Q1 but he couldn’t get comfortable on the bike.

The team reverted to Brookes’ previous setting for Q2 but he still lacked front-end feel. He said that the issue was down to a faulty front Pirelli after testing their Q1 settings on a new tyre in this morning’s warm up resulted in his fastest lap of the weekend.

Brookes said: “We went back to the firmer setting on the front and we retested it this morning with a new set of tyres and it proved that the bike was progressing in the right way and we did make the right changes. It’s just the luck of the draw with getting a bad tyre.”

“It does happen. There’s so many tyres we put through the bikes through a weekend, you’re bound to get one that’s not performing as well every now and then.”