Jonathan Rea Cruises To A Second Superbike Win—Cooler Runnings At Laguna Seca

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n Sunday morning warm-up—wham!—Eugene Laverty dropped to a shocking 1:22.850 lap time on his Aprilia at Laguna Seca. Cooler conditions (the day began with chilly fog and tiny water droplets) allowed front tires to behave normally. With yesterday’s hot weather “mystery grip” a thing of the past, rider confidence increased and lap times fell. Rider tire choices remained largely just as before. Why? Because those choices were originally made in expectation of Sunday’s conditions. In race 1, air temperature had been 83 degrees Fahrenheit and track temp 119, but in warm-up those numbers dropped to 59 and 78. To make the top finishers in race 1 work harder for the fans, they are made to start three rows back in race 2. Business as usual: Jonathan Rea came from ninth to fifth at the end of lap 1, moved to second behind fast-starting Laverty on lap 4, and took the lead on lap 8.

Meanwhile, Rea's Kawasaki teammate, Tom Sykes, was unable to advance. As the race commentator nattered on about this or that bike being "hard on tires," I realized that if Rea were not here, that announcer would be saying the very thing about Sykes' Kawasaki, stuck back in eighth place and going nowhere. I remembered BMW's early years in World Superbike with its powerful S1000RR. As the bike developed, rider Troy Corser could at times lead for a few laps, but then the bike, having consumed its tires, would drop back to finish out of the top 10.

But wait. Sykes was World Superbike champion on the most powerful (pre-rev cuts) version of the ZX-10R-based racebike, a machine his crew chief, Marcel Duinker, characterized as "brutal." Why didn't that bike devour its tires just like the BMW did?

One answer is with that power—loosely described as 250 hp—Sykes was able to use his very pure Superbike riding style: late, extremely hard braking, early turning at low apex speed, finishing with quickly lifting up to accelerate powerfully to a high exit speed. This style can work because it limits time on the tire edges to the very minimum. That preserves tire condition, as it does for Marc Márquez in MotoGP. As I described yesterday after race 1, each time the regulations have cut back the Kawasaki's revs (and therefore its power), Sykes has had to compensate for reduced acceleration by carrying more corner speed, which, in turn, has increased the time he must spend on the vulnerable tire edges. That, combined with his natural abrupt riding style, makes it harder to keep tires sweet through 25 laps of racing.

How does Rea do it? Before he came to Kawasaki, he rode a Honda whose clutch was straight mechanical—not controlled by electronic systems as on the Kawasaki. In order to go fast without such enhancements, Rea had to develop an extremely smooth, shock-free, and tire-friendly riding style that probably shares much with the tire-conserving style now being seen in MotoGP from Jorge Lorenzo. When Rea moved to the Kawasaki, its advanced electronics suite let him stop swinging three bats by being a sympathetic partner to his shock-free riding. The result has been the most successful partnership in Superbike.

Why can’t Sykes (and, surely, other riders facing similar problems) just adapt? First, not everyone can. John Kocinski was a brilliant rider on a 250cc GP bike, and he gave Honda’s “terrible 45” (the V-4 RC45) its only Superbike championship in 1997. But he was never able to adapt his 250cc riding style to the Vance & Hines Ducati or Erv Kanemoto’s 500cc two-stroke Honda. In practice, he could go fast by consciously altering his style, but when the flag dropped he would revert to what came naturally—and go slower.

Yeah, but Lorenzo has adapted, right? Yes, but doing so consumed 18 winless months of a career that won’t last forever. Riders are paid to win races, not attend style school.

There may also be other problems with Sykes’ bike setup, with the tires, or with software and systems. You can be sure that meetings are now in progress and that engineers are combing the data for hard answers that can make Sykes a contender at the next round of the series in Italy.

Both Duinker and Giorgio Barbier of Pirelli explained how many things must be tightly controlled to add up to a winning result. Duinker’s example was this: “If you replaced the rear tires on the grid with others, distributed at random, whose grip properties varied over a 5 percent range, the finishing order would be completely different.”

Barbier said, “You cannot change any component on the bike without seeing an effect on the track—the rider will feel a difference immediately.” For best results, just do everything perfectly.

Rea's margin of victory was five seconds over Chaz Davies, who had finally got past Laverty for second on lap 17. Laverty commented that when grip is good—as it was today—the Aprilia can go well. But reduced grip transforms it into a bit of a truck in a car race; its weight makes it go its own way. The two threatening Yamaha riders, Alex Lowes and Michael van der Mark, completed the top five.