[ad_1]
Jonathan Rea has described his current WorldSBK performance levels as “frustrating” after another weekend of poor pace at the Emilia-Romagna round.
Rea qualified 17th and was trying to move forward at the start of Race 1 on Saturday, but crashed at Turn 13 while trying to get around Dominik Egerter, who will suffer two technical failures in the races.
8-10 was Rea’s scorecard on Sunday, which even taking into account the pain from the accident was not enough for Rea to give an assessment of the weekend more positive than “really disappointing”.
“Obviously it’s been a really disappointing weekend but I also have to feel very lucky to have escaped that crash yesterday, because it was huge and apart from having a lot of pain in the wrist and left hand, I was physically fit on the bike,” Rea said. “I wasn’t too bad.”
Turning his focus to his performances on Sunday, Rea said: “I made two good starts today in both races, apart from where I tangled with Remy who braked himself at Turn 8 on the first lap of Race 2 and lost a lot of track position.” But I struggled to get going when the tire was new. The racing got a little better towards the end when the tire was moving, but I wasn’t able to get the best out of the starting bike and it didn’t have the confidence.
“The current performance level is disappointing, but it is clear that the R1 could be more competitive so we need to find a way to translate my feeling to adapt and make changes that help me get the best results from this package.”
Rea’s teammate, Andrea Locatelli, performed better at Misano, but did not have the speed to fight for the podium. The Ducati of Nicolo Bulega and Alvaro Bautista, the winner of all three races, Toprak Razcatlioglu, and even Alex Luiz’s Kawasaki all proved to be a step above Locatelli on Sunday, although the Italian managed to beat Luiz to take fourth place in Saturday’s first race.
“Honestly, I would like to do more and I would like to be on the podium, especially today in the race held in my home and with great support from my fans from all over Italy,” Locatelli said. “But we know that we need to keep working.” We believe in ourselves, and we continue to make progress forward to be there. Today was definitely not easy, but we got a lot of points, we didn’t make any mistakes and we gained a lot of confidence for the upcoming races.
“We had a good weekend and I would have liked to fight for the podium like at some other circuits where we were stronger and could fight more with our rivals, but I think we did well, we were working very well and I want to thank the guys for their efforts,” he said. It’s always difficult in the hot conditions in Misano, but we were a big step faster compared to last year.
[ad_2]
Source
