WorldSBK Catalunya Superpole Race: Jonathan Rea wins five lap thriller

Jonathan Rea extends his title lead over Toprak Razgatlioglu.

Toprak Razgatlioglu and Jonathan Rea went toe to toe in the Catalan Sprint Race which was reduced to a mere five laps following from various crashes and a red flag.

The race began as you’d expect with Toprak Razgatlioglu and Jonathan Rea trading places throughout the opening laps before a crash between Kohta Nozanne and Andrea Locatelli forced many riders to take evasive action including Scott Redding who was pushed back to the back end of the grid finishing in P15 which puts him at a disadvantage for Race 2 later today.

Toprak and Rea’s place swapping allowed Bautista to catch up to second place and overtake Razgatlioglu until the title contender got the best of the HRC man who eventually came home with his first podium in nearly a full calendar year. Due to the small amount of laps Toprak knew he had to dig deep if he wanted to be able to take victory and claw some points back in the championship, he was closing sector by sector cutting the gap from 0.6 seconds down to 0.1 until a mistake in the last lap handed victory to Rea.

Just outside of the podium points was Alex Lowes leading Michael Ruben Rinaldi and yesterdays podium finisher Axel Bassani who takes his best ever dry finish of P6.

Big shoutout to Samuele Cavalieri who has returned on a Ducati taking a really strong P11.

Full results – 

Featured image – Dorna