Josh Brookes set to stay with Visiontrack Ducati for 2022 BSB season

Josh Brookes looks set to stay with Visiontrack Ducati after confirming a 2022 BSB deal is already agreed. 

Should the expected deal be announced by Paul Bird’s team, the two-time British Superbike champion will take part in his fourth consecutive season with Ducati after joining the team alongside current WorldSBK rider Scott Redding in 2019. 

After winning his first BSB title with Yamaha in 2015, Brookes took the 2020 championship before suffering an unexpectedly difficult 2021 season.

The Australian was regularly outperformed by team-mate Christian Iddon, and although he squeezed an unlikely showdown spot late on in the season, Brookes was only able to finish sixth - 62 points behind Iddon. 

On the subject of why he struggled so much having just taken the title a year earlier, Brookes felt the latest engine spec was a big reason why: "The engine got updated from ‘19 to ‘20 and then updated again in 2021, obviously with every motivation to make things better, as nobody intends to make it worse, that’s not the motive,” Brookes told Australia's MCNews. 

"But the team committed to the latest spec’ engine and purchased them all ready for this season, and as the rounds went on it was becoming more evident to me that there was a problem.

"So when you know that chassis wise it is all exactly the same, and we even swapped swing-arms to check it wasn’t that, plus I had a crash in testing so we put a new chassis in, just to make sure it wasn’t any of these other elements that could be contributing, and all we were left to think was that it was the spec’ of the engine, because everything else seemed more or less the same.

"We were left to wonder, was it our spec’ ECU? The engine has improved but the fact we don’t have the ability to tune it the way other series do. Is that where the element or area of question is? Or is it just purely the engine, for gaining more top power lost its efficiency in corners?"

Although the team is yet to confirm Brookes or a potential team-mate for this upcoming season - the rider alongside him could be Tom Sykes - the 38 year-old confirmed an agreement to remain with the team was made before last season ended.

Brookes added: "We had an agreement made before the end of season last year, but I think the reason for having no press releases and the like, is that I believe at the moment the team is in the process of trying to bring new people into the racing sponsorship world, so if and when that’s achieved is when announcements will be made. 

"They will try and put as much focus on a new sponsors as possible but for the moment it’s just an agreement that we know we’ve got."