Source: Supplied.

Local wildcard Josh Brookes will face added challenges in this weekend’s Yamaha Finance round of the 2017 Motul Superbike World Championship at Phillip Island after losing his number one motor with a mechanical problem during the pre-race tests.

Brookes, 33, is riding the Yamaha YZF-R1 that he won the 2015 British Superbike Championship (BSB) aboard under the ER Motorsports banner, however it’s not been smooth sailing so far for the highly-credentialed Australian.

Mixed weather on Monday minimised progress made, before engine dramas on the out-lap on Tuesday forced the team to revert to a lower-spec back-up option. He made it back out in time for the final two-hour session, ending up 17th overalll with a 1m32.396s lap-time – 1.851s off world champion Jonathan Rea at the top of the charts.

“On the first lap of Tuesday the engine tightened up,” Brookes explained. “There was something wrong with it and it’s done. It wasn’t a massive explosion or anything, but you know what and engine feels like when it’s dying. We had to swap the engine, but the one with the problem was our good engine and the one I was hoping to use for the whole week.

“So, now we’re quite a few horsepower down and using what is a very basic engine. Losing the track time – two hours in the morning – was a bit of a downer, but in the afternoon session the bike worked well and everyone did a good job to get us on track. We set about going through a few set-up changes, because from what we know from BSB, it isn’t perfectly suited to Phillip Island.”

With his more powerful motor parked and not expected to be fixed ahead of the race weekend when it begins on Friday, Brookes will look to extract more from himself and the package he has, while relying upon consistency to gain the strongest result possible across Saturday and Sunday’s races.

“As you know, these guys in the world championship don’t muck around and losing a two-hour session and being a privateer, we’re already behind the eight-ball. I think if I can improve the settings a little bit further, come race weekend I might be able to close the gap a bit. What we do have isn’t particularly bad on tyre wear, so I might not get the outright lap-time I was hoping for now that the engine’s a bit slow, but consistency might help get a half decent result.”