A unique tyre combination utilising both Pirelli and Dunlop brands at Morgan Park’s fifth round of the Yamaha Motor Finance Australian Superbike Championship proved to play an important role in Cru Halliday’s race two victory on Sunday.

Despite being loyal to Dunlop in his Yamaha-backed privateer effort this season, Halliday has revealed he was unable to match the feeling of the Pirelli front tyre with a Dunlop option, resulting in what has been a race-winning tyre combination.

“We had the two-day test at Morgan Park, that was the second time we tried the Pirelli,” he told CycleOnline.com.au. “That was the second time we tried it, we tried the Pirelli the week before in Sydney on the front. We hadn’t really used the rear Pirelli until the test and we only had one of them.

“We used it once, so we stayed on the Dunlop rear at the test and got data. I said to my old man that we don’t have much data on the Pirelli, so we may as well go with the Dunlop rear because we have data for it and we know what that tyre is going to do.

“We will probably try the Pirelli rear if we get another test, but I don’t think we’ll have another test before Sydney, so we’re more than likely going to be on the same set-up again. You do get off people that ‘you’re running Pirelli front and Dunlop rear and that you can’t do that’, you hear all these things people say, but we’re privateers – we’re paying for the tyres.

“We have been pretty loyal to Dunlop all year, but when a front tyre works as good as a Pirelli front does, it’s hard to go away from that option. We didn’t have a close encounter at all at Morgan Park in [terms of] crashing and, if you look at the results, that’s the first time I’ve used a Pirelli front.”

Morgan Park also marked the first weekend that Halliday commenced working with renowned suspension specialist Krooztune in 2017, who was able to provide a setting for the capable New South Welshman that was based off his factory Yamaha Racing Team YZF-R1M from the previous season.

“Dad and I went down to Melbourne the week after Darwin because we were both scratching our heads,” he continued. “I wasn’t sure what was going on in Darwin, the front-end of the bike was chattering all over the joint, we just didn’t have a good set-up.

“We got a little lost in setup, so we took it down to Dave at Krooztune – he serviced the forks and put some settings back into the bike from last year because he worked with the factory team. He had some of our settings from Morgan Park last year, he practically reverted back to that – we did chop and change a little bit. Getting the forks back to where they were and getting the bike sorted to where we know where it was at, that’s a helped a long way.”

Halliday currently sits sixth in the championship standings as the ASBK series heads to Sydney Motorsport Park on 8-10 September for the sixth round of the series.