Pata Honda's Jonathan Rea has declared he will have to man-up to get podium results in tomorrow's Aragon World Superbike double-header after a suffering a sensor problem in today's Superpole.
The feisty Irishman had to abort two flying laps in the final part of qualifying when a wheel-speed sensor malfunctioned and Rea said he felt like a passenger under braking but added he had to take some of the blame for not pitting straight away.
"Today was a mixture of positive and negative, really. We made a lot of progress on our race set-up and, with the electronics, we’ve got kind of close to where I feel we were last year. But, going into Superpole 3, a wheel-speed sensor caught us out and trying to match wheel speeds with everything else under braking went completely out the window and I felt a bit like a passenger," said Rea.
"It was partly my mistake staying out for two laps at the beginning and not coming straight in but I wasn’t sure what the problem was and I was trying to change the engine brake settings. We didn’t have enough time left to get out at the end and it was quite frustrating because it was a problem we found out about after Superpole
" What I feel should have been the second row is now the outside of the third row, so I can just hope and pray for a clean start tomorrow. We’ve been in the top five all weekend, timing wise, and I feel we did a pretty good race run this morning – a long run – which I was happy enough with.
"And we’ve improved since then, so it’s just a race where I feel we’ve been handicapped a little bit more than we should be at the start. We’ll see – it’s more experience; I still feel like we’re doing a lot of testing but we’ve got to man-up for two 20-lap races tomorrow."