It was a somewhat frustrating day for Tom Sykes at Magny-Cours as the #FrenchWorldSBK round got underway on Friday, with the Yorkshireman experiencing some rear braking problems with his Kawasaki ZX-10R.

Sykes finished Friday’s practice sessions in third place on the timesheet with a 1'38.068 best lap, as he got an important weekend underway. The 2013 championship winner aims to keep title rival and teammate Jonathan Rea in his sights in the general standings at round 11, with a 47-point gap between the pair at present.

However, Sykes revealed that things did not go as smoothly as he would have hoped in FP2. “It’s a big shame, as we had some technical issues with the rear brake,” he stated. “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 that we never got to do that this afternoon.”

“I feel like we are ready to race, we have the potential to make a good race, so this is positive but the negative is that we lost quite a lot of time. Overall, the big picture is that we are ready but we definitely need to find the cause of this problem because it could be a big problem in the race and also very dangerous.”

Looking ahead to Saturday he added, “We’ve got some wet weather coming tomorrow now, obviously we have struggled in the wet but we have quite a good plan. So, sure, I don’t want the wet weather to arrive but if it does it’s also quite exciting.”