WorldSBK Assen: Rea puts on another Dutch masterclass

No rider in the history of WorldSBK has got such a personal scorecard at Assen as Jonathan Rea.

It was one of the few tracks he could make the Honda Fireblade look like the bike to be on in WorldSBK. He won five races there on the CBR, before extending his Kawasaki/Assen win total to 11 in race one on Saturday afternoon, April 23, 2022.

Carl Fogarty’s birthday, funnily enough, the rider before Rea who also had a special connection to Assen, and most of the big statistics numbers in the biggest production-derived class of all.

Third in Superpole, behind his own team-mate Alex Lowes, Rea had to share some race leading tasks with Toprak Razgatlioglu. But in the end, Rea had enough to hold off a late attack from Alvaro Bautista in the final Geert Timmer chicane to win by just 0.1 seconds.

He and his tech team, led by Pere Riba as ever, made plenty of changes to his bike between arrival in Assen and winning, as the pace of WorldsSBK in 2022 demands that the bike has to be ‘just so’ or you have no chance. Ask Toprak Razgatlioglu, the 2021 champion.

Rea was, apparently for a time missing something: ”My Assen feeling, flowing with the bike, so it was a matter of step by step changing the setup, the balance of the bike. We did a lot from wheelbase to head pipe position, angle. Generally now I felt quite good.”

It was not all change, just tailoring in some regards. “The bike is behaving in a similar kind of way to Aragon, but with an Assen character. Assen is a circuit where you can’t fight against the bike. It’s a real rider’s circuit, but you need the bike to turn, you need the bike to flow.

“When you have that, then you can start creating some of the Assen magic, if you like, in certain areas. But the race was a difficult one