JoshBrookes spent much of Saturday’s MCE British Superbike free practice session getting a good pace on race tyres before going out and storming to pole.

The Bringelly rider says he feels in a good place to capitalise on his pole position in tomorrow’s opening MCE British Superbike Championship race after concentrating on getting a strong rhythm on worn rubber this morning.

“It’s only first couple laps we get the luxury of feeling good grip with the new tyre. But that’s often hindered by the fact the bike feels heavy with a full fuel tank,” he told Bikesport News.

“After about six laps, the fuel load is significantly noticeable but by that time you’ve already used the best of the tyre so from that point to the end of the race it’s a management of tyres to find a rhythm that works with the wearing tyre when you’re losing grip

“There’s no point in me giving myself false confidence in practice by putting new tyres in. Maybe it will improve the outright lap time, but we’re here to race for the full distance, not just one lap. So whilst the bike seemed to be in a good range, we just kept with what were quite worn tyres.

“We wanted to keep getting that feeling and try and fine tune the set up on worn tyres, so then we know exactly what we’re going to be facing during the race.”

Happy with his times on used rubber, Brookes was able to concentrate on the job in hand for qualifying, and admitted he was thrilled to finally be able to give the Anvil Hire TAG Racing Yamaha squad its first pole.

“Everyone involved has put in a lot of work and everyone involved in the team wants to be where we are today, but it’s a hard road to get here”, he added.

“For me, these are conditions I don’t normally struggle with so I was kind of interested to see how I was going. Each session we went out, the track was changing a lot, when we first went out in Q1 it was really wet and with each lap it changed right through to the very last lap at the end.”