Image: Keith Muir.

Yamaha Racing Team with Yamaha Motorcycle Insurance (YMI) manager John Redding has clarified the refuelling saga that sparked confusion during the second race of the Australasian Superbike Championship at Queensland Raceway on Sunday.

Teammates Glenn Allerton and Wayne Maxwell were forced to restart from pit lane as a penalty for YRT refuelling their bikes there following a red flag late in the race, but still managed to finish second and third on combined times for a 1-2 overall.

Confusion set in when the pair failed to acknowledge the refuelling of their YZF-R1Ms in the post-race podium interviews, but were ultimately accepting of the penalty without any protests lodged afterwards. It’s understood that series representatives witnessed the refuelling take place.

“I didn’t see any fuelling going on!” Allerton said on the official Livestream. “It’s funny, you can make an accusation that someone’s fuelled and get them penalised without any evidence, so I don’t know – who knows.”

When questioned if he refuelled, Maxwell said: “It doesn’t matter, does it? We got the penalty, we’re guilty before… I don’t know if there’s any video footage or camera footage, so I’ll let that decide what’s going on out there.”

However Redding has since confirmed that the team did refuel in pit lane following fears that they wouldn’t go the complete 16-lap distance – plus the sighting and warm-up laps – upon restart.

Redding has suggested series organisers revert to three shorter races across all rounds in the future to ensure the situation doesn’t arise once more. The final three rounds of this season are all scheduled to be three-race events.

“The races were quite long, they were close to our fuel envelope, so after Cru [Halliday] crashed and additional laps were added, we were concerned that we would run out of fuel,” Redding told CycleOnline.com.au.

“We had two choices; have the slim chance of running out of fuel or put a couple of litres in there and obviously cop a penalty if a penalty came, so we did. That penalty still meant that we could race and finish, but if we had not done that then we could have run out of fuel and obviously not finished. That would have affected our day a lot worse.

“We didn’t protest it, we expressed concern that we believed the length of the races, when an incident like that is thrown into it, is pushing the boundaries a little bit on the size of the tanks and fuel consumption of these bikes, so we suggested to Terry [O’Neill] that quite honestly there should be some consideration given in going back to the three-race format.”

Alongside the factory Yamahas penalised upon the restart were SA Kawasaki BCperformance pairing Ben Burke and Evan Byles, also forced to start from the pit lane.