Rea and Pata Prometeon Yamaha Thwarted in Portimão Race 1

Both Jonathan Rea and Andrea Locatelli move their sights to a strong comeback tomorrow after a Race 1 to forget at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve, in Round 7 of the 2024 FIM Superbike World Championship today.

In an extremely close Superpole session, the Pata Prometeon Yamaha pair qualified on the third row of the grid, in P7 and P8 respectively. However despite a strong start to Race 1, positive results were elusive come the chequered flag.

Initially Locatelli made an excellent launch off the line down the hill into Portimão’s spectacular Turn 1, until Rea came through and forced his way towards the podium group of riders, to place himself as the stronger of the two official Yamaha riders in the opening laps.

The Northern Irishman carved his way through to fifth by Lap 4, then as he closed rapidly on Michael van der Mark for fourth position at Turn 13, unfortunately connected with the rear of the Dutchman’s bike and was forced to make a spectacular save to keep himself in the race.

Despite high confidence in his Yamaha R1 WorldSBK and having recovered from this near-crash, soon after Rea’s quick shifter system failed, meaning that he had to shift gears manually for the remainder of the 20-lap feature race – an almost impossible task when the target is to keep up with the frenetic pace of WorldSBK.

Meanwhile Locatelli was knocked back to seventh in fray of the opening lap and found himself unable to make progress forward in the top-ten group, by his own high standards suffering an extremely unusual lack of late-race pace to eventually cross the line in 11th place.

Tomorrow the team “goes again” with a short Warm Up at midday for WorldSBK followed by the Superpole Race in the hottest part of the day at 14:45 local time, followed by Race 2 in the early evening at 18:00.  

Andrea Locatelli – SP: P7 / Race 1 P11

“Honestly, it was a strange race – it was difficult to fight to stay with the front group, I struggled a lot and my feeling was not the best. We are focused on looking forward, the feeling was good in FP3 and Superpole but in the race the performance didn’t come. It’s difficult to say anything more, but we will work to make another step to be ready for tomorrow and fight again. P7 in Superpole was not bad for us, so we have a good position to start strong in the Superpole Race!”

Jonathan Rea – SP: P8 / Race 1: P15

“We definitely found a step forward today, but unfortunately quite early in the race we had an issue with the quick shifter so I couldn’t shift up or down with the electronics, and had to go back to manual shifting. The lap time obviously dropped a lot but I didn’t want to give up on the race – before this problem, my R1 was the strongest package I’ve ridden all season. Even without an amazing start, I made a good Turn 1, was able to pass some riders and felt like I could potentially catch the group in front. More positives than negatives to take from today, but it’s frustrating that we had a technical problem that kind of kicks us when we’re doing our best to keep the recent upward trend going and the confidence high! I definitely feel like we’ve turned a corner, I can ride on the limit and take liberties with the R1 to exploit its strengths and tomorrow in the Superpole Race I still get to start from my qualifying position in eighth – it gives me a good chance to get a good result and try to finish the weekend strongly in Race 2.”

Paul Denning – Team Principal, Pata Prometeon Yamaha:

“In the end, we saw a lot of promise but no result for Jonathan in today’s Race 1. He rode a perfect first few laps to put himself in a top five position to challenge the front group, but unfortunately, we suffered a quick shift failure, meaning that the bike lost both auto back-shift and up-shift. On a track like this, with so many hard decelerations and up-shifts required when the rear tyre is spinning, it’s almost impossible to ride without it. We don’t know the reason yet, but at this moment investigations are ongoing. For Loka, after a promising step forward in FP3 and qualifying, the race was honestly disappointing – he didn’t have the rhythm that both he and the team expected, so we need to dig deep tonight and find a solution to help him come out swinging again in the Superpole Race tomorrow afternoon.”