Image: Russell Colvin.

Yamaha Racing Team duo Wayne Maxwell and Glenn Allerton will turn up with their focus on winning the Yamaha Motor Finance Australian Superbike Championship presented by Motul Pirelli on Sunday at Winton.

The pair were surprisingly unable to qualify for Saturday’s Pirelli Superpole in Victoria, placing Allerton seventh and Maxwell ninth on the grid respectively.

With Honda’s Troy Herfoss claiming a point for pole today, Maxwell’s lead has been reduced from seven to six points and he will have to resolve a number of issues in a bid to hold onto the points advantage at the end of tomorrow.

“It’s going to be difficult,” Maxwell said. “It’s one of our worst qualifying positions I think in 10 years, so it is what it is now, we’ve just got to make the best of the bad situation.

“I know from the feeling of my bike, from the way the tyres are wearing and from the laptime that, you know, we’ve got a massive problem. If we can fix two out of those three things the last one should fix itself and hopefully we can try recover tomorrow.

“To say that we can win from where we are is probably a little bit unrealistic, but you never know – as quick as you’re up, you can go down in this sport, so we’ll just see how we go and see what tomorrow brings.”

As for Allerton, he enters the final round of the 2016 season 11 points behind Maxwell, increasingly looking like a long-shot for the championship after failing to score the point for pole position today.

“Starting from the third row’s not ideal,” Allerton said. “In the dry I was having some issues with the front of the bike in Q2. It was actually looking like I was going to make it through on the last lap, but ran a little bit wide and we didn’t make Superpole.

“I’m actually in shock about it, but it definitely looks like we actually have the pace to do the job – the times that we did here in the test match the pole time then, so I’m quite confident that if we do get a dry race and I get a good start, I can make a race of it. I’m super-motivated to make this happen and tomorrow you’re going to see the best of what I can do.”