WorldSBK Aragon: Winter soft-tyre work benefits Rea

Jonathan Rea played the best game of pre-race set-up and in-race tactics to win a brilliant WorldSBK race-one fight with eventual second placed rider Alvaro Bautista by just 0.090 seconds.

It looked like all three accepted top riders in 2022 - Rea, Bautista and World Champion Toprak Razgatliogluwould be the ones in contention, before the 18-lap race itself started.

Other than a bit of impressive catching up and hanging on from the other factory Ducati of Michael Ruben Rinaldi, for a while at least, the big three gapped the rest with ease.,Eventually it was just Rea v Bautista, just like 2019.

And again just like 2019, Rea came good at the end of the race, as he did at the end of that season. It was certainly one of his best races, as he held off the plainly much faster Ducati with his nimble Kawasaki, even using the SCX rear tyre he usually cannot use in the mid-20°C track temperatures of Race One. The perfect race? “Not perfect,” Rea said. “For me, perfect is going and going. It was a nice race. An exciting one. I really enjoyed it - the battle. I think we really showed the strength of our bike in the battle that it was very agile, stable on the brakes. I could change direction.

“The work we did in the off-season with focusing on the softer tyres, the SCX family, 557, is really bearing fruit now because I was able to be very fast until the end with the soft tyre in a very cool temperature. Even before the race we were thinking, ‘we’ve done all this work but we’ve never, ever made this SCX work in 24 degrees.’ So, big credit to my team, Kawasaki, Showa. Really big win for us to do that. Not just to win the first round of the championship, but the way we did it and with the tyre. I’m really happy. Of course, we have two