Although he didn’t finish in the top-10 in any of the races, Jonathan Rea says he was able to gather some potentially useful information about the CBR1000RR-R and its attributes versus some of its competitors.

Rea’s best result in Portugal was only a 12th place, although he explained afterwards that his physical condition was still not fully recovered after surgeries he had over the winter.

But despite being away from the top positions, Rea thinks he was able to gain decent information from the races by riding around some satellite Ducati riders.

“I enjoyed the race because I was riding with some riders like Tarran Mackenzie and it was very good because I could understand the reference of Ducati against Honda,” Jonathan Rea told WorldSBK.com after Race 2 in Portugal.

“I could see some areas we were strong and some areas we could work. 

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“So, it was good from that point of view to gather some information. 

“Also [during the Portuguese Round] we’ve attacked a little bit, like instead of staying in our lane understanding what we have, trying some different things. 

“Yesterday I rode quite a different bike to today, today we tried something quite different with how the bike behaves on the side of the tyre, and just looking for some answers to our questions. 

“We have some conclusions that we can draw from that. 

“I’m testing quite soon now and [hopefully] I can take that on and develop those ideas and make the base of the CBR a little bit better.”

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Rea added that he learnt “many things” during the weekend.

“But that’s for my crew and the technical people inside Honda,” he added.

“But it’s nice to ride with other bikes because you can really, especially riding so close, understand in which areas of the track they’re better and relay that info to the crew and they can check data. 

“There’s so many engineers now that control these bikes, so I’m enjoying that side of it more and more.”

Rea will be back in World Superbike race action for HRC at the Dutch Round on 17–19 April as Jake Dixon continues to recover from injury.

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