Jonathan Rea (Kawasaki Racing Team) ended day one at MotorLand Aragon on top, setting a lap time of 1.50.062 in Spain putting him just 0.099 ahead of his rivals, but the Northern Irishman is convinced he still has work to do ahead of tomorrow.

Coming off the back of a perfect start to the season, Rea now heads to Europe hoping to continue his strong performance and following a solid winter test at MotorLand he is looking to combine his base set-up from both the test and the start of 2017 with his ZX-10RR.

Able to put in a full race run, the reigning world champion is happy with his pace: “The bike feels quite good and the base set-up is working quite well. But unfortunately during my long run I really struggled in the brakes, I just need more confidence. We did a long run here on the tyres, so I think tomorrow there are a couple of things just to change to give me a bit more confidence. Generally it’s been not so bad for the first day, we managed to make the race distance so we can understand the lap drop, and we managed to make one lap fast so it bodes well for tomorrow.”

Team-mate Tom Sykes (Kawasaki Racing Team) was also able to make progress on his Ninja machine, ending the day in the top three and feeling happy heading into the all important Saturday.

Working with used tyres in order to understand his full race potential, the Yorkshire rider and his team were able to work on small changes in order for him to feeling comfortable in Europe. Rain plagued the final five minutes of FP2, meaning himself and the team tried to fit in all parts to test, however he was happy with how the day went overall. Just 0.243s behind Rea, Sykes is yet to understand his full potential for Race day.

 “We felt generally quite good,” explains Sykes. “We started slow in FP1 and just made some small changes, which meant in the end we made a very good lap time on used tyres. So we took this information and base into FP2, made a couple of small changes, and the initial lap time was very good so we worked with that. When I came into the garage half way through the session we could see the clouds were coming, we rushed two alterations to understand for tomorrow’s race, but we managed to make them. In that respect we wasted a lot of potential and a little bit of time to focus on lap time, but we got this information so overall I am happy now.”

Watch the reigning manufacturer’s champions battle it out in Superpole and the race with the WorldSBK Video Pass, which gives you access to all action, which kicks off at 10:30LT with Superpole 1.