Donington Park Round

This past weekend was the fifth match of the WorldSBK season at the circuit of Donington Park, to England.

With a free practice session last Friday for water and a cooler environment than expected, the KRT riders took the first laps on the English asphalt. Tom Sykes led the entire practice session with the best times until the end of the session when Jonathan Rea won the first position to 0.204 seconds.

On Saturday Sykes broke a new record in the qualifying session, getting his 44th pole position, thus surpassing the highest number of poles achieved in the history of the WorldSBK. In this way he became the poleman of the weekend in a very special circuit for English.
Starting from the first position and followed by his teammate Jonathan Rea who led the first five laps after the start, both riders were overtaken by Michael van der Mark who took the victory leaving the second and third steps of the podium for Rea and Sykes respectively in a race declared dry.

With this result, on Sunday our pilots came from the third row of the grid and had to fight to get the best result. Rea climbed several positions to reach the second place, behind an unstoppable van der Mark that took the second victory of the weekend. However, during the last laps the young pilot Toprak Razgatlioglu of the Kawasaki private team made us live an exciting final making a gap between the top positions and thus surpassing the reigning world champion who finally finished third. A bad tire choice caused Sykes to finish in sixth position.

After this result, Rea takes an advantage of more than 50 points compared to the second classified in the general, Chaz Davies. While Tom Sykes occupies the fourth place tied in points with Michael Van der Mark that occupies the third position. The next round of the championship will take place at the Brno circuit in the Czech Republic between 9 and 10 June, a circuit where the KRT has been training recently.