Rea back to his winning ways

In Slovakia, Jonathan Rea was the rider who scored the most points, with three podiums, including a victory. The Kawasaki rider scored his first win of the season on Saturday afternoon, after taking the bold decision to start on intermediate tyres, even though the track was still very wet. Fifth on the opening lap, Rea moved into the lead five laps later by overtaking the Italian rider Bassani. From then on, the six-time world champion extended his lead over his rivals before controlling Razgatlioglu's comeback in the final kilometres. “Up until then, I'd had very little experience on the intermediate tyres," he explained. “I hadn't really used them before. The bike was spinning up a lot at the start of the race, but I knew that if I could get the tyres up to temperature I could make a difference.”

It was a plan that worked just as he’d hoped. The following day, with the Sprint race, Rea made his 400th WSBK start, a new milestone for the Brit. The result was second place, just over a second behind Toprak Razgatlioglu. And in the final race of the weekend, the six-time world champion finished third, less than a tenth behind Danilo Petrucci: "I could have tried to overtake Danilo, but I would have had to risk contact to do so. And I didn't want to spoil a great weekend.” Especially as it enabled him to move up one place in the overall standings. Less on form than at Donington, Alex Lowes finished ninth in Race 1, seventh in the Sprint race and fourteenth in Race 2. Lowes once again paid the price for his modest twelfth place on the grid. "Everything is so tight in Superbike today that it's difficult to hope for a result starting from that far back," lamented the Kawasaki rider.