This final round of the Superbikes World Championship meant the end of a very fruitful connection between Kawasaki and Jonathan Rea, where the rider conquered several world titles. However, the British rider lamented his fall, which limited his last race.
In a statement, the rider recalled in general terms how the race “ended” for him, in terms of results: ‘A bittersweet last day. I wasn’t riding with emotion or anger, I was just flowing with my bike in the second Race. My team boss Pere Riba made a big change, something similar to what we did in the test here in May, and it worked very well’.
The British rider talked about some issues that affected him practically from the first day of work, and how he ended up not having the best performance… leading to a crash: ‘Throughout the weekend, grip was low and we have been using a setup from the previous round. I even told Uri, my chief mechanic: “This race is for us.” I got to the front and thought the feeling was good, but of course it was too good. With a very different bike setup, with different margins, I overdid it a bit in T2. The bike got a bit nervous on entry and, instead of relaxing on the front brake and turning a bit later, I really committed to turning with a lot of lean angle and went down.’
Rea lamented how the race unfolded, with him crashing while leading and still coming back to try for a final push for points:
‘It wasn’t the ending that the team or I deserved. I wanted to finish in the right way. But we didn’t go down without a fight. The right handlebar was very forward, I had about 15 mm of support left for my right foot, so I just wanted to finish the race. When I saw my second or third time after crashing, I was doing 1m41s, which was faster than Race One on Saturday. So, I kept pushing, thinking maybe I could score a point. Today I have some strange feelings overall. Not from a performance or results standpoint, just strange because I am leaving an incredible team.’
