Image: Supplied.

Josh Brookes faced technical issues in both outings at Silverstone’s opening round of the 2019 Bennetts British Superbike Championship (BSB) last weekend, marking a difficult racing debut with the Be Wiser Ducati outfit.

Qualifying an uncharacteristic 18th, the former BSB champion fought through in each of the two encounters, making his way into the top 10, however an electrical fault saw his factory-backed Panigale V4 R come to a halt in race one, before a technical issue arose in race two, calling for a premature end to his weekend.

“There’s not a lot I can say about today other than it’s obviously disappointing to come away with no points,” Brookes commented. “But I wasn’t alone as Jason O’Halloran was another rider to have strong rides only to come away with two DNFs.

“That’s the nature of racing and you can have as many good weekends as bad ones so it’s a shame for the whole team that we didn’t finish either race. I think we showed the pace we have when everything’s going well, and we’re all motivated to do well as we know what potential we have but sometimes things happen that are out of our control.

“We’ve shown that we’re competitive against the other teams and know there’s plenty more to come so we’ll just forget about this weekend and look ahead to the next one.”

Josh Elliot (OMG Racing) and Tarran Mackenzie (McAms Yamaha) split race victories at Silverstone’s opener, the duo tied on points for the lead in the series rankings. The British Superbike Championship returns to action on 4-6 May at Oulton Park.