Rea and Haslam complete Aragon test
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01/01/1970
Pata Honda World Superbike riders Jonathan Rea and Leon Haslam have completed a three-day test at Motorland Aragon in Spain ahead of next week’s second round World Superbike championship event at the same circuit.
In spite of strong wind and a damp track on the final day, the all-British pairing concentrated on the fine-tuning of a revised electronics system for their Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade race machines.
The development will continue at an additional test at the Alcarras circuit 185km west of Barcelona in Spain on Sunday and Monday next week before returning to Aragon.
Leon Haslam
It’s been a frustrating few days actually because we haven’t been able to move the new electronics on from where we were in Australia in the first round. The weather today didn’t help either and there’s a lot more work to do before we’re ready to challenge properly next weekend when we come back to Aragon for round two. Physically, I’m feeling good after the recent operation on the foot I broke last year, so I’m ready to do some more testing before then!
Jonathan Rea
I did a back-to-back comparison with last year’s electronics and it’s easy to see the potential that the new system has. However, the teething problems we had in Australia don’t seem to have gone away so we haven’t got as much out of this test as we wanted. We’ve got another couple of days testing at Alcarras next week, which will be really useful. We’ve also got some good brains working on the system, so we know there’s more to come.
Pieter Breddels – technical co-ordinator
It’s fair to say that we haven’t been able to progress in the way we would have liked here in Aragon as we are still working on fine-tuning the new electronics. We got a little stuck on Tuesday and Wednesday but today was a little more positive. We discovered some bugs on Wednesday evening and we learned some useful things from Jonathan’s comparison today. We’ll use that to develop the system some more in a two-day test at Alcarras on Sunday and Monday. It’s not a question of ‘if’ this new system will be better, it’s ‘when’. Of course, we’ll work hard to make that as soon as possible.
