Reigning World Champion Tom Sykes put in a faultess display to take a lights-to-flag victory in World Superbike race one at Motorland Aragon with team-mate Loris Baz bagging second and the world championship lead.
The Huddersfield man was untouchable from turn one while Baz had the unwanted attentions of Davide Giugliano’s Ducati Panigale until the halfway stage but the Italian couldn’t quite live with the Frenchman’s pace and dropped into the clutches of Jonathan Rea.
In what was a fairly processional 17 laps, much of the excitement came at the end as Rea’s Pata Honda reeled in Giugliano and a perfectly-timed slipstream down the back straight on the final lap saw the Castletown resident take the final podium spot.
But Rea ran fractionally wide and Giugliano saw a small gap.The pair clashed and the Roman came off worse, dropping the 1199 but re-mounting to finish in eighth place which allowed team-mate Chaz Davies to hop into fourth.
It also gifted Eugene Laverty another place but the Irishman had worked hard to come back from 13th early on, courtesy of an error. The Voltcom Suzuki man was lapping almost as fast as Sykes in the lead and had to push past both of the Toni Elias, both the of works Aprilias to take fourth.
Sylvain Guintoli’s fifth meant he surrendered his title lead to Baz while his team-mate Marco Melandri suffered some sort of problem as his early pace floundered and he was passed late on by both Alex Lowed and Leon Haslam, who rounded out the top ten.
Leon Camier, who is replacing Sylvain Barrier in the BMW Italia team, was the quickest Evo rider by eight seconds in 12th while Christian Iddon finished just outside the points but is excluded from the results as his Bimota BB3 is not yet homologated for competition.
