Josh Brookes ended the opening day on track at Silverstone in eighth place after free practice but the Milwaukee Yamaha rider is confident he can close the gap ahead of the two MCE Insurance British Superbike Championship races on Sunday.

Brookes is determined to bounce back from his double DNF in Assen last time out and is feeling confident that the team's meticulous working regime today will give them a chance to come back stronger ahead of qualifying tomorrow in preparation for Sunday's races.

Brookes said:

"The first session out we continued with our normal routine where we run what we have had previously, or we go for a compromise on settings with what we expect to work at the track. We have come with an Assen set up that has a slight change, knowing what we do about the Silverstone circuit. The next series of things we look at are what problem one is and work on that and then number two and consider that and so on. Number one problem today was the bumps, particularly in the rear as it didn't handle them too well, so we made significant changes for the second session to fix the problem and then go faster.

"We have made massive improvements on the bumps and corner entry and it feels good, but now we need to work on the exit grip and the steering from the middle of the corner to the exit of the corner. We improved it a bit at the end of the session on old tyres so we could get a fair comparison. On paper it might look bad but actually I am quite comfortable and confident that we can find a good direction tomorrow and hopefully be back in the range of getting closer to Kiyo."



.