This final round of the World Superbike Championship signified the end of a very fruitful relationship between Kawasaki and Jonathan Rea, where the rider won several world titles. However, the Briton regretted his crash, which limited his last race.
In a statement, the rider recalled in general terms how the race «ended» for him, as far as results were concerned: ‘A bitter-sweet final day. I wasn’t riding with emotion or anger, I was just flowing with my bike in Race Two. My crew chief Pere Riba made quite a big change, something like we had at the test here in May, and it worked really well’.
The briton spoke about some problems that affected him almost from the first day of work, and how he ended up not having the best performance… leading to a crash: ‘All weekend the grip has been low and we have been carrying a rolling set-up from the previous round. I even told Uri my chief mechanic, ‘this race is for us.’ I got to the front and I thought this feeling was good, but of course it was too good. On a bike set-up that was quite different, with different margins I just overstepped it a bit in T2. The bike got a little bit squirrelly going in and instead relaxing on the front brake and blowing the corner a little bit, I really committed to make the corner with a lot of lean angle, and down I went’.
Rea regretted the way the race had gone, crashing out when he was leading, but he still came back and tried to make a final assault on the points:
– Not the ending that the team or I deserve. I wanted to finish in the right way. But we didn’t go down without a fight. The right handlebar was bent far forward, I had about 15mm of right footpeg left, so I just wanted to finish the race. When I saw my second or third laptime after I crashed I was doing 1’41s, which was faster than I did in Race One on Saturday. So I just kept going, thinking I could maybe score a point. I have some strange feelings overall today. Not from a performance side, or results side, just strange because I am leaving an incredible team.