Shortly after the incredible feat of winning 100 WorldSBK races, something nobody has ever done before, Rea took his 101st race win in the Superpole sprint race, on Sunday morning at Motorland.

He did not get 102 in Spain because he was on the wrong tyres in the race that Scott Redding was on exactly the right tyres in. Rea knew that, and realised second was probably going to be his best effort in Race Two - the weekend’s full race finale.

Amazingly, Rea did get to second place and had to recover from a trip to the gravel in the process. Garrett Gerloff ran in too hot and collected Rea, falling and then sliding into the Kawasaki rider, but not quite causing him to fall off.

“Yeah, it was a surprise, especially that early in the race because everybody had a look when the tyre warmers came off and I could see that Scott had the slick tyre which I thought, that’s probably the right choice,” Rea told bikesportnews.com.

“With three minutes to go, I actually asked my guys was there a slick tyre around, but too late. So I knew that the race would settle down at some point and Scott would come. So this manoeuvre so early, in that part of the track, the line was very small.

Lucky I didn’t go down because the bike was caught in my bike, but I got on the throttle and managed to disconnect with the bike and I went across the gravel pretty fast and then I could rejoin. I let a few bikes pass so I didn’t get any advantage. Then I put my head down.

“I felt I was the best of the rest today because the tyre situation. It’s so difficult because on the sighting lap from the pit box to the race start is twenty minutes, and it’s twenty minutes the track was 180 degrees (changed). So the warmup lap, I just knew I’d been in a little bit of trouble. But lucky for me the majority were on the same combination. So I settled into a nice race with Van Der Mark and Alex.

“I could see I was strong in some areas, they were strong in others. But with three or four laps to go, I really tried to make a gap but the Pirelli intermediate combination was really strong because I expected it to make a big drop in the race but it never did. It stayed quite constant.

“So kudos to them and to my guys for making a really good setup in them conditions. It really is guess work because you don’t know how the track is going to be. I think we maximized the weekend what we could do. The only way to make a perfect weekend was to make a different tyre choice in race two.”

Rea’s strong opening weekend allowed him to take a championship lead of 17 over Redding and 12 over Lowes.

“It’s the first round of the championship,” said Rea. “We don’t want to think about the championship, but it’s a lot better than I started last year. I started 19, 20 points back in fourth. So it’s a better position to be in.”

The intermediate tyre choice was made by Rea in both Sunday’s races, but the first race being considerably shorter means that it was not the full determining reason to use it in the final long race. Not for Rea at least.

“No, because really at the ten-lap period that’s when I expected the intermediates would start to really deteriorate, and I never really had that feeling in the Superpole race because ten laps was ten laps,” said Rea. “ If I had to do the same race tomorrow, it’s just so hard.

“Like I said, before that twenty minutes from pit lane opens to the red lights go out is a long time. So maybe we should think about that a little bit more, or in them conditions have maybe one or two guys around the circuit with the radio giving us some info because we see the result today. It was clearly the wrong choice, but I felt the most conservative. I would have been pretty nervous starting the race with slicks, to be honest.”