Jonathan Rea and Tom Sykes completed two days of testing at Aragon on Wednesday and Thursday, with reigning World Champion Rea setting the fastest times and Sykes second on the unofficial timesheets. Kawasaki Racing Team used the two days in Spain to begin the transition between the official 2016 machine and the new for 2017 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10RR.

Rea’s fastest time of 1’49.8 was well under the official race lap record of 1’50.421. With such a positive start to the winter schedule, the Northern Irishman was pleased with the efforts of his team and looks ahead to the next outing.

“The base bike was working quite well and the track was in quite good condition on both days,” explained Rea. “We lost a bit of time on day one but on the second day we got really stuck into our test plan. Kawasaki has been working hard on the engine side and we had some upgrades on the chassis, which were positive. Showa have been working well and brought a new shock and forks to try. We are pretty happy and we can continue our work on the suspension side in Jerez next week. On the engine side, we have been much more consistent than we have ever been here with race tyres. We were able to do a lot of laps on Thursday and overall it was a very encouraging test.”

Sykes put in 150 laps of MotorLand over the two days, using harder SC1 tyres. He set a best of 1’50.4, which was the second fastest time of the test and almost exactly on lap record pace. After working with some new engine specifications Sykes focused on his chassis and suspension.

“We’ve had two bikes in the garage to try and use the time more efficiently, and we’re relatively happy with our progress,” said Sykes. “On hard tyres we have shown good initial performance over race distance, so I am pleased. We have been working a lot with the chassis and trying to find a better balance. We have gone absolutely everywhere with the chassis settings as we obviously can’t do that during a race weekend. We’ve been working to the new 2017 technical rules and overall we have had quite a few little tweaks to the gearbox, clutch, suspension, electronics and chassis. Thanks to the boys in the team and Kawasaki as they have been working so hard. They’ve hardly put their spanners down.”

With a new Ninja to race next year, winter testing will take on a whole new level of importance from now until the first round of the new season at Phillip Island in Australia in February. For now though, the KRT squad prepare for another Spanish test, this time at Jerez de la Frontera, starting on 21 November with four days of track action planned.