Tom Sykes has had his wrist slapped by race direction after they deemed he had ridden irresponsibly in today’s second free practice session at Magny-Cours.

The Kawasaki man ended the day third quickest despite having his free practice two run cut to just eight laps when he developed problems with the rear brake.

But he later found himself in hot water when it was decided he had not ridden in a responsible manner, and had failed to respect the marshals indications after he realised he had a technical problem.

As a result, the Yorkshireman was slapped with an official warning for causing a danger to himself and other riders and for acting in a way which was “prejudicial to the interest of Sport”.

Sykes meanwhile was more concerned about finding out exactly what today’s issue was. “It’s a big shame, we had some technical issues with the rear brake,” he sighed. “You know, that kept sticking so unfortunately I only got a handful of laps.

“This morning I had quite a good feeling with the bike, we needed to make some improvements based on this morning and it’s unfortunate we never got to do that this afternoon.

“I feel like we’re ready to race, I feel like we have the potential to make a good race performance so this is the only positive, like I say the negative is we lost quite a lot of time.

“Overall I think we’re ready but we need to definitely find the cause of this problem because it could be a big problem in the race but also very dangerous.”

With the threat of wet weather looking stronger than ever, he added that thoughts of at least one wet race haven’t been far from anyone’s mind and that everything was in place to ensure they are ready.

“We’ve been working on set up, trying to get a good feeling with the ZX10R and we’re getting closer to the mark now but we’ve got some wet weather coming tomorrow now and obviously we’ve struggled in the wet but we have quite a good plan.

"Sure I don’t want the wet to arrive but if it does it’s also quite exciting because I’m looking to try and get a much better feeling with my bike and go racing, because the points are close and we need to make the most of that.”