WorldSBK Navarra Superpole: Rea takes pole in late shootout

Jonathan Rea has taken pole position in a late shootout at Navarra.

Jonathan Rea has continued his 100% pole position record in 2021 with yet another Superpole at Navarra making it seven consecutive pole positions, matching the record held by Ben Spies. It was a very entertaining final few minutes of the session with the P1 spot exchanging hands five times with Chaz Davies first up to the mark, holding P1 for all of 10 seconds before Andrea Locatelli came along and knocked him off his pedestal.

It was then Tom Sykes who would arrive at pole, the pole hound looking to take the provisional pole position before Scott Redding and Jonathan Rea came along and demoted him to third place with Jonathan Rea the last rider of the five over the line, Rea set pole position with a lap time of 1:36.122, a time 0.062 SLOWER than Andrea Locatelli’s FP3 time meaning the lap record for the circuit will be held by Andrea Locatelli until 2022 unless there is some absolute mad lad in the races who can go faster than pole position.

As you can imagine, the front row was led by Rea followed by Redding 0.093 seconds behind then Tom Sykes, basically, in reverse order to the above list, row two was led by Locatelli then top independent Chaz Davies in fifth place, now, this is where it gets interesting because joining the duo on row two was Lucas Mahias on the independent Puccetti Kawasaki ahead of Alex Lowes on the full factory machine. Mahias returns after some time off with a broken scaphoid and has instantly shown to be extremely competitive, he has been showing signs of his speed all year long and his return could be the key to unlock this.

Row three was headed by Alex Lowes ahead of the Yamaha duo of Toprak Razgatlioglu then Garrett Gerloff, Razgatlioglu being uncharacteristically beaten by his teammate in a strange state of affairs, he won’t be too worried though given he is incredible off the line proving this at Donington Park a few weeks back when he came from P13 to P2 within one lap of the race.

Rounding off the top 10 and heading row four was Michael van der Mark ahead of Axel Bassani then Alvaro Bautista.

Full results – 

Featured image – WorldSBK