Rea Second After Day One At Qatar

The first day of practice for the 13thand final round of the WorldSBK season ended up with Jonathan Rea second fastest easily qualifying automatically for Superpole 2 on Friday the 26thof October.

With track action beginning just before dusk today and finishing with two completely dark sessions held under Losail’s impressive floodlight arrays, it was a challenging first day of contrasts for many riders. Even after a fast crash in FP1, Rea recovered in the second and third sessions and finally ended up second fastest overall, just 0.183 seconds from Eugene Laverty (Aprilia). 

The track surface at Losail was dusty to start but after a clean line developed as the day progressed the lap times gradually improved. All but one of the top ten riders set their fastest pace in the final FP3 session. 

FP4 on Friday will be held in the heat of the day but the first race will take place in the relative cool of the evening, under full floodlights. 

Jonathan Rea, stated: “I feel if we could go racing now I could fight for the win. I changed direction a little bit too aggressively and had too much lean angle on the dirty part of the track in FP1, before there was a lot of rubber down, and it was a slight mistake on my behalf. The way I attack weekends and sessions means I always go fast in the first laps, and I felt good even on my out lap. I did not have the best feeling in FP2 and we are just missing those two or three set-up changes just to give us a bit more confidence. It looks like this weekend there are more competitive guys. Right now we are in the mix but we are not ahead of everybody. We are going to try to improve the set-up and we know the changes we want to make tomorrow.”