This week marked Jonathan Rea’s debut for Pata Yamaha in the two-day World Superbike tests at Jerez. It was the first laps on track, in a new career cycle for the six-time champion after nine seasons with Kawasaki.
At the end of the sessions, the British rider commented that it was a test for initial adaptation: ‘My first feelings with this team were fantastic, since I agreed to move. Both the team and Yamaha were really welcoming and made everything easy. The first test was to get familiar with the bike – it was a bit of a shock, I had many different sensations than what I’m used to – but in a positive way!‘.
As for his impressions of the YZF-R1, Rea stated that it is an easy bike to ride that gives feelings of confidence: ‘The R1 is very user-friendly – it’s not necessarily easy to push to the absolute limit, but it’s easy to ride. It generates a lot of traction, which encourages you to go fast and inspires confidence. You can accelerate and use the power of the bike – it’s a good feeling and now I can see how Toprak [Razgatlioglu] rode like he did, as well as Andrea being so competitive this year. Everything is good! It was simply a nice first contact with the setup and the team, so I hope that next time we can delve deeper into this.’.
Regarding his work program yesterday, #65 mentioned: ‘Step by step we tried some different things, fork specification, different tire combinations so that I can understand how Yamaha uses different compounds – I could see from the past that Yamaha was able to maximize the SCX tire. I asked for some different electronic settings, but nothing major. I was using the current “base setup,” so to speak, of the R1 and in the next test we will start working on development components.’.
In conclusion, Rea added: ‘A very positive experience on both days and the R1 feels more like my bike, particularly because we were lucky with the weather on Wednesday afternoon and did more than expected. I’m sure I could wake up tomorrow and there would be even more performance, but now I have to wait a few weeks! Thank you all, I truly enjoyed it!’.
