Josh Brookes kept out of trouble to take a valuable second place in Sunday's solitary British Superbike race, handing his championship hopes a major boost. The Australian entered the weekend in the sixth and final Showdown position and strengthened that spot at Oulton Park despite tricky weather conditions which caught out some of his rivals.
With eventual winner Tommy Hill disappearing into the distance, Brookes admitted that the incidents earlier in the race had convinced him not to chase the Swan Yamaha rider and collect 20 valuable points.
“It was not nice out there today, but we’re obviously happy with another strong podium. From my grid position I had to take a few risks to get up to where I was when the safety car came out, but I wasn’t prepared to gamble again as I’d already had too many moments. I saw Shakey having problems and Hopper obviously went down so I just backed it off and brought the big GSX-R1000 home. The second race being cancelled could play into our favour as I like Cadwell, but you can’t count your chickens…”
Relentless Suzuki team manager Philip Neill felt Brookes had taken a sensible decision but rued the cancellation of the second race, believing it was there for the taking.
“It’s a good feeling for everyone in the team that we were very competitive all weekend and especially in the wet. But it’s also very disappointing to lose out on the second race, which we feel we could have won. It was nice to see Josh coming through like he did and was the fastest rider on track until the pace car came out, which always changes things. He did the right thing though to bring it home when Tommy got the jump on them all, but as I say, we’ve had a great wet-weather set-up on our GSX-R machinery this past three years and we really were confident of a win in race two.”
