The Milwaukee Yamaha team have moved up to second in the MCE Insurance British Superbike Championship standings at Knockhill as Josh Brookes scored a pair of fourth places, with Tommy Bridewell overcoming a difficult weekend to finish inside the top seven.

In the opening race of the weekend Brookes was determined to take the fight to pole-sitter Ryuichi Kiyonari and standings leader Shane 'Shakey' Byrne, but the Australian was unable to match his pace from qualifying day and narrowly missed out on a podium in race one by 0.235s to Stuart Easton. The second race continued in a similar pattern for Brookes and despite a battle with Chris Walker, he doubled up on fourth places at the Fife circuit.

Bridewell had overcome a tenth place qualifying start to move up the order before a brake issue caused him to drop back down the order to fight for sixth place. In race two Bridewell was fighting to carve his way through the field when the issue reoccurred but rode a mature race to finish seventh, remaining inside the top six in the standings.

Brookes said:

“I am a bit confused with today really. I used the same bike and the same tyres all weekend, but yesterday we were able to set a better pace than we have today. It wasn’t a particularly different day from the rest of the weekend here in terms of conditions and yet I don’t know where the lap time went. I tried everything to go faster and ride harder, but what was really frustrating for me was not that I came fourth, but that Shakey wasn’t his dominant self and I wasn’t able to capitalise. It is when he is having a bad day that I have got to have a good day. When he is having a poor weekend by his regular standards it was an opportunity for me to pounce and I fumbled. I am frustrated and I don’t have any answers so I have just got to put this round behind me and work on going further ahead at Brands Hatch.”

Bridewell said:

“This weekend the team have done an amazing job. We obviously had a problem in free practice three which set us back, but to a degree it didn’t as I qualified seventh. We have had a good weekend and I can’t fault the team, but unfortunately in the races all of a sudden we had a brake issue which basically cost me a couple of podiums today. I am a bit disappointed because if you look at my lap times and my overall race pace I know for a fact that we would have been fighting for the podium. I have to look at the positives and I think we have shown good form. The result have not been what we wanted by far, but we managed to salvage results which is why we have to look at it positively.”

Team co-ordinator Mick Shanley said:

“It has been a trying weekend really but we will take the positives out of it. Josh has moved up to second in the standings, whilst we didn’t end up with a podium, we had two fourth places which showed consistency. We have a bit of a question at the moment as we are not really sure where we lost performance today. We just couldn’t match the pace we had yesterday so we need to go back to the workshop and try and resolve that. I think that Tommy had a couple of issues in the races, but overall he has had quite a strong weekend after everything that happened for him in practice and in qualifying. I think that the whole team has worked really well together during a tough weekend and we have now got to focus on moving forward at Brands Hatch.”

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