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Rea: "We need to make some clever overnight decisions"

Friday, 26 October 2018 18:13 GMT

    • Despite domination the 2018 world champion has some changes with his ZX-10RR

    Heading into the final round of the season, the pressure of the world title might be off for Jonathan Rea (Kawasaki Racing Team WorldSBK) for the title, but there is still plenty to fight for. Determined to put in a solid race under the floodlights, Rea took his 11th win in stunning style.

    Unable to snatch pole position from Tom Sykes (Kawasaki Racing Team WorldSBK) in the opening sessions of the day, this didn’t hinder the 31 year old as he got a storming start off the line and headed into the first corner in the lead. From here, Rea never looked back and he was able to pull a half second gap on the opening laps. Taking the win by 1.4s over his team-mate Sykes, Rea still had some issues with his ZX-10RR he wants to fix ahead of race two.

    Gunning for the all time points scoring record, as well as the most victories in one season after equaling the 27 year record of Doug Polen in Friday’s race one, Rea and his squad will have some work to do for tomorrow.

    “I really enjoyed the race,” beamed Rea. “Especially the first part as I felt really good with the bike, but all weekend I’ve felt a little bit on the back foot so we made some good changes for FP3. Unfortunately, in the last few laps I fell into some tyre issues, which was just a lack of time where we struggled to help with the front end, so tomorrow in Warm Up we can try something a bit new to help that. The bike and package feels good around here, and I’m enjoying it and love racing under the lights at night, so it’s super cool.”

    Continuing to break records, Rea adds: “Honestly, the 17 race wins in a season I thought it would never be possible to even match it. Of course it would be nice to surpass it but it’s not the biggest thing. For me tomorrow, we have a bike to win but we need to make some clever decisions overenight to try and create a package to last the distance, because we’re coming through traffic from the third row of the grid. We’ll see, but the pace from the podium has been really fast from Alex and Tom, so we definitely have to step up tomorrow.”

    Keep up with the on-track action from Qatar and see if Rea can end the season continuing to break records, all with the WorldSBK VideoPass.