Jonathan Rea (Kawasaki Racing Team) was happy to take second position at the legendary Imola circuit in the Motul Italian Round, following a tough start to the weekend as he is unable to make the gap up to the flying Chaz Davies (Aruba.it Racing – Ducati).

Starting from the front row of the grid, the reigning world champion was able to get a steady start off the line as he kept in touch with the leaders in the early laps. Chasing down Marco Melandri in second position, Rea was able to catch him early on and establish a solid pace around the technical track.

Rea: “I’m very happy. From Friday morning to today we knew that Chaz was going to be running a different race today, his pace is really really strong, the bike seems to be working good and today I think the best case scenario was to finish second tomorrow. I think we still faced some difficulties in the race but we can try and learn from it and find out how to bridge that gap, but we knew this round was going to be difficult so today has gone well.”

Tom Sykes (Kawasaki Racing Team) continues to battle through the illness which has hampered him in recent rounds, and narrowly missed out on a podium battle with Marco Melandri (Aruba.it Racing – Ducati) as the red flags were waved.

Struggling in the warmer temperatures with his Kawasaki machine, Sykes is confident he can improve on his pace for tomorrow as he plans to make some changes overnight with the machine.

“I’m very disappointed,” explains Sykes. “We had a good pace in practise and Superpole and for whatever reason in the race I struggled with the set-up on the bike. The only answer can be the increase in temperature so that caught me out a little bit, and really we didn’t have the feeling with the ZX-10RR. Tomorrow is another day, we have a couple of ideas to make a better balance after today’s result but ultimately we were caught out as up until this morning I was happy with the bike feeling.”

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