Rea hampered by traction control issues on Friday

Kawasaki Racing Team’s Jonathan Rea did not enjoy the best of starts to his Jerez weekend, the Northern Irishman finishing the day three tenths adrift of his teammate and struggling with the set-up of his bike.

This weekend presents Rea with his first opportunity to wrap up the world championship, as he leads teammate Tom Sykes by 48 points with just 100 left up for grabs this season.

Despite finishing seventh on the time sheets in FP1, Reas was happy with the bike and his pace, and looked to improve on that in FP2 with a radical set-up change. This proved to be a step in the wrong direction, and the team had to spend quite a bit of time to revert back to Rea’s FP1 setting.

The reigning Champion’s main issue is with his ZX-10R’s electronics. Rea complained of ‘a lot of traction control interference’, a problem that never seemed to disappear during the course of the afternoon despite his Kawasaki team’s best efforts.

As a result of his woes, Rea was unable to do much in the way of race preparation and heads into tomorrow’s first 21-lap encounter on the back foot. He ended the day ninth fastest with a 1m42.098s whilst main rival Sykes topped the time sheets.

“To be honest the least of my worries was Superpole today. It was just trying to build my pace up better, we had a really good morning session and then we changed the bike radically to something we were planning to do in winter testing,” explained Rea.

“It didn’t really work and we’re struggling quite a lot with traction here so we reverted back to what we had in the morning but it took a long time for the guys in the box. So I only really got two runs today.

“There is a lot of traction control interference. We’ve taken the power away off the bike and still I’m having a lot of interference so we need to analyse why that is because the base setting is quite like what we had at Donington and Misano. Unfortunately because of those issues we didn’t really get to do a long run today. I guess we are only two to three tenths off on average, so we will try to pull a rabbit out of a hat tomorrow morning.”