Mixed feelings for Pata Honda duo

Jonathan Rea and Leon Haslam have mixed feelings this evening after today’s Superpole sessions at Motorland Aragon in Spain left them in ninth and eleventh places respectively on the grid for tomorrow’s two second-round World Superbike championship races.

Haslam, particularly, had a testing day which began with a crash in this morning’s second qualifying, causing the British rider to miss the entire 45-minute session. Technical issues in the subsequent free practice hindered his progress further but he qualified for Superpole thanks to his lap time from yesterday.

The 29-year-old British rider made it to Superpole 2 and did his best time on a race tyre, leaving him reasonably satisfied.

Rea, meanwhile, made impressive steps forward, finishing inside the top four in both regulation qualifying and free practice. The 26-year-old from Northern Ireland made it through to Superpole 3, where a broken wheel-speed sensor restricted him to a third row start.

Jonathan Rea – P9, 1m57.765s (Superpole 2)

Today was a mixture of positive and negative, really. We made a lot of progress on our race set-up and, with the electronics, we’ve got kind of close to where I feel we were last year. But, going into Superpole 3, a wheel-speed sensor caught us out and trying to match wheel speeds with everything else under braking went completely out the window and I felt a bit like a passenger. It was partly my mistake staying out for two laps at the beginning and not coming straight in but I wasn’t sure what the problem was and I was trying to change the engine brake settings. We didn’t have enough time left to get out at the end and it was quite frustrating because it was a problem we found out about after Superpole. What I feel should have been the second row is now the outside of the third row, so I can just hope and pray for a clean start tomorrow. We’ve been in the top five all weekend, timing wise, and I feel we did a pretty good race run this morning – a long run – which I was happy enough with. And we’ve improved since then, so it’s just a race where I feel we’ve been handicapped a little bit more than we should be at the start. We’ll see – it’s more experience; I still feel like we’re doing a lot of testing but we’ve got to man-up for two 20-lap races tomorrow.

Leon Haslam – P11, 1m58.329s

I’ve never been so happy to be P11 on a grid! On Friday, we had a lot of problems electronically which we couldn’t get sorted. This morning we went out and I didn’t even get one lap – I had a big crash and lost the whole session and that was the session when we needed to sort a few of the issues. We did the whole session in Free Practice 2 but a sensor had broken and we didn’t find out until after that session. So, going into Superpole 1 was my first go on a bike with sensors working so I was really happy. I think I went 1.6 seconds quicker than I did before, which is quite hard to do when you’re under pressure to do it in one lap. But the bike worked. I made a mistake in Superpole 2, which knocked me out by less than a tenth. So I’m really happy with what we’ve done – we’ve solved the issues that we had but it’s still going to be a tough race tomorrow.

Pieter Breddels – technical co-ordinator

Today with Leon we encountered a lot of problems and we were not really making progress at all. Still, we managed to make Superpole and reached eleventh place in the end, which was pretty good, considering everything. We had to find a setting in Superpole itself and in the end he did a really good lap on a race tyre and started to feel good on the bike. I must say ‘hats off’ to Leon for staying calm, keeping on working and keeping his comments coming. Despite his position, we look forward to the race, and he does, as well. On Jonathan’s side of the garage we managed ninth place and it could have been a possible second row but we had a small problem with the bike. He wasn’t able to put in a good lap time on his last Superpole run and we must apologise for that. These things happen. They should not happen, but they sometimes do, and Jonathan did not get what he deserved today. I hope he can find a good rhythm in warm-up. His race pace is quite good, so we’ll see tomorrow.

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