Jonathan Rea and Kawasaki Team Green have started the Suzuka 8 Hours race weekend in great fashion, getting into provisional pole position, all because the triple World Superbike champion showed just how fast he is on a Ninja ZX-10RR and scored a new lap record at Suzuka!
Rea finished a lap at the Japanese track with a record time of 2m05.168s, beating the previous record set by Pol Espargaró on a Yamaha in 2015 by a big margin, since Espargaró took 2m06s to complete a lap on this endurance race.
More impressive than that, Jonathan Rea was wearing race specification tyres from Bridgestone, not the qualifying spec tyres that everyone thought he needed to use to achieve these times. Now, the factory Kawasaki squad is in front of everyone, and will be competing for pole position during the Top 10 Trial session, where the 10 fastest teams compete for the 10 best spots in the grid for the Suzuka 8 Hours race.
Kawasaki Team Green average time was 2m06.448s, with Rea being the faster rider of the team, Leon Haslam second fastest 2m06.636s, while Kazuma Watanabe was the slower rider of the factory Kawasaki team with a time of 2m07.541s.
Just 0.322s away from Kawasaki is the factory Yamaha squad specially prepared for this race. Composed by Katsuyuki Nakasuga, Alex Lowes and Michael van der Mark, the Yamaha Factory Racing Team was second fastest, with Red Bull Honda with Japan Post, a team directly created by the HRC department, was third fastest, with Takumi Takahashi being the faster rider of this Honda team.