On the resurfaced track at Sepang in Malaysia, Kawasaki riders Jonathan Rea and Tom Sykes finished Friday in P10 and P11 respectively, as they concentrated their efforts on preparing for Race 1 instead of pushing over one lap.

With several other riders putting in soft tyres at the end of the first day to try and get into Superpole 2 directly, Rea and Sykes chose instead to work in their own way with race pace settings, to ensure they are fast over full race distance on the Ninja. With some others suffering with tyre degradation, setup over race distance could prove crucial. After the first experience of the resurfaced and reprofiled asphalt at the 5.543km circuit in Sepang, it has proved to be grippy, but could prove to be harder on tyres.

Ant West, replacing injured Sylvain Barrier at Pedercini, was consequently the fastest Kawasaki on track at Sepang on Friday in an impressive showing, and Sykes finds himself in Tissot-Superpole 1, where he will ride to join Rea and the rest of Friday’s top ten in Superpole 2.

“I am good in the first split time and not so good in the middle two,” said Rea, who recently re-signed with the team for another two seasons. “We focused on using the harder tyre because I think for everybody it is quite a gamble to use the softer tyre on this new tarmac. It seems all the times in front were set on the softer tyres. So we are not panicking and just working for the race. Everything feels fine. We learned quite a lot today because we worked with the bike quite a lot – electronically we changed some things. Our consistency seems quite good it is just that the surface here is bringing a good lap time with the softer tyres.”

“We focused a lot more on durability and endurance today and I am very happy with our pace considering where we still need to improve,” added Sykes, who despite going through Superpole 1 has a great qualifying record at the Malaysian track. “I think we have a good pace over distance. We sacrificed positions in qualifying to get that but it is not the end of the world. We just have to do three extra laps in Superpole tomorrow. I think we are prepared better for the race now after we made a small change, so it was better to understand that that than to put in a new tyre and go for a lap time. If we had done that we would probably have had two more question marks for tomorrow’s race. A 15-minute session on Saturday makes it very tricky to judge your race performance.”

Sykes has his chance to move through to fight for the front row in Tissot-Superpole 1 on Saturday, which begins at 13:30 local time (GMT +8), before the lights go out for him and Rea for Race 1 at 16:00 later in the day.