Josh Brookes celebrated claiming pole position at the penultimate round of the MCE Insurance British Superbike Championship at Silverstone, smashing the existing lap record to lead the field, whilst Jakub Smrz will start from the second row.

Brookes was a dominant force in qualifying, upping the pace with each stage of Datatag Qualifying, claiming his fifth pole position of the season, as he looks to extend his 28 point advantage in the standings after the two races tomorrow.

Smrz continued to build momentum and he scored his best qualifying result of the season with the Milwaukee Yamaha team, 0.855s adrift of his team-mate Brookes.
 
Josh Brookes

"I kind of changed my character a bit during qualifying as normally I will do two, three or four laps and ride to the chequered flag, but in Q2 I did a really nice lap and I felt there wasn't a lot more I could achieve and I thought that it would be enough to get into the final qualifying. I wanted to leave that good thought in my head going into the last run.

"I saw '03.9 on the dash and I thought to myself could I go for another lap? Which was my normal strategy, and I thought if someone could beat that lap then they deserve it because I laid everything fairly well on the line on that lap. I didn't really believe I could make a better lap without another fresh pair of tyres so I just pulled off and rode it into the pits.

"The team have done a really good job with the bike to give me that confidence and I looked at my pit board and saw a 0.2 and I thought who the hell is that close to me, as I was expecting to see a bigger gap, and it was Hopper. He was the previous track record holder - and it shows he's feeling good on his bike. I am looking forward to the races tomorrow and this has given us more confidence.”  


 
Jakub Smrz

"Today I got lot more confident on Milwaukee Yamaha R1 and we found some good improvements on set up as well. In Q1 I wasted a lot of time in traffic and I wasn't able to set a good lap to be 100% safe into Q2.

"The result was I had to start Q3 on a used tyre but I am still happy with the second row even if it could have been a front row. For warm up we want to try more changes to see if we can find something more for race. Thanks all my team for a great job!"