WorldSBK Indonesia: Third is ‘mission accomplished’ for Rea

Given the pace of Toprak Razgatlioglu in Mandalika WorldSBK practice and Superpole, and knowing that Alvaro Bautista could have the edge in a machinery face-off on each straight, Jonathan Rea looked at his podium place in Race One - albeit over nine seconds - as mission accomplished, and more.

“Better than I expected,” he said at Mandalika on Saturday. “The target was the podium, to be honest. vIn Superpole I put a lap together that could be second, but I didn’t expect to have Toprak in my view for so long, but after four or five laps I thought, ‘maybe I could be here?’ But as soon as the grip dropped and the bike starts behaving differently, all around that five, six, seven, eight section, on the side of the tyre I was really struggling.

“The biggest worry for us before the race was the front tyre. We were destroying the front tyres. In parc ferme at the end of the race they were bad but not so much worse than the others. The problem was my rear tyre was quite shot compared to the others. So, we need to try to improve the grip level tomorrow, especially when the initial grip drops, stop these movements. The track’s rubbering-in, so of course it’s getting better and better. So, even without a setup change, consumption should be better tomorrow, but we still need to make a step.”

The narrow but increasingly-grippy racing line around Mandalika, which was freshly and completely resurfaced just two weeks ago, played its part in Rea explaining what his bike felt like to ride in Indonesia, with a maybe one metre wide grippy ribbon of asphalt over the full lap.

“We rode yesterday and tried to go with a short wheel base, “ said Rea. “Tried to keep a lot of traction for it. I can’t ride the bike like this. It’s so nervous. I