Kawasaki Racing Team’s Jonathan Rea ended day one of the Gaerne Spanish Round in ninth place on the timesheets with a best lap time of 1'42.098 at Jerez.

The championship leader and defending champion was 0.359s adrift of his teammate Tom Sykes who topped the Friday sessions. The Northern Irishman put the gap down to experiments with his Kawasaki ZX-10R and a lack of traction.

“To be honest the least of my worries was Superpole today,” Rea reflected. “It was just trying to build my pace up better, we had a really good morning session and then we changed the bike radically to something we were planning to do in winter testing. It didn’t really work and we’re struggling quite a lot with traction here so we reverted back to what we had in the morning but it took a long time for the guys in the box. So I only really got two runs today.”

He added, “There is a lot of traction control interference. We’ve taken the power away off the bike and still I’m having a lot of interference so we need to analyse why that is because the base setting is quite like what we had at Donington and Misano. Unfortunately because of those issues we didn’t really get to do a long run today. I guess we are only two to three tenths off on average, so we will try to pull a rabbit out of a hat tomorrow morning.”