Hometown hero Josh Brookes will begin his 2016 World Superbike campaign in just a few hours at Phillip Island with a new Ohlins shock to try with the Suter swingarm and linkage he first used at Jerez last month and has high expectations for 2016

The reigning BSB champion believes he will know pretty quickly how close he is to the competition but has a lot of development work to do with the new parts during the test and race weekend in Australia.

“I will be able to tell right away how close we are. We have got a lot to improve but I have some high expectations of what we can achieve. The front end of the bike is fine, so that will stay the same but we haven’t used the Ohlins RSP40 yet as it wasn’t available,” said Brookes, speaking to bikesportnews.com.

“Because of this, we couldn’t invest too much time in using the standard TTX shock as we won’t use it. As soon as we get to Phillip Island, we will start to work on the settings for the rear of the bike and after that my main issues are power delivery and throttle response.

“Currently the way it responds at the minute is not an enjoyable one and it is like that because that’s the way it has always been done. It doesn’t offer me much confidence and I’m not ready to race yet so we need to change it.

“It’s quite easy to do, my crew say it can be easily altered to be more like it was last year, we need to change some numbers in a table in the ECU. It’s not like we have to go away and spent a load of money on new parts.”

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