{"id":593325,"date":"2026-04-08T11:51:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T11:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/593325\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T11:51:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T11:51:08","slug":"jonathan-rea-gains-ducati-reference-for-honda-despite-tough-portuguese-worldsbk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/593325\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Rea gains Ducati \u201creference\u201d for Honda despite tough Portuguese WorldSBK"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\">Although he didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Rea\u2019s best result in Portugal was only a 12th place, although <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crash.net\/wsbk\/news\/1092738\/1\/jonathan-rea-wasnt-ready-honda-worldsbk-return\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">he explained afterwards<\/a> that his physical condition was still not fully recovered after surgeries he had over the winter.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">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.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cI 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,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crash.net\/wsbk\/racer\/1555\/jonathan-rea\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Jonathan Rea<\/a> told WorldSBK.com after Race 2 in Portugal.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cI could see some areas we were strong and some areas we could work.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cSo, it was good from that point of view to gather some information.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cAlso [during the Portuguese Round] we\u2019ve attacked a little bit, like instead of staying in our lane understanding what we have, trying some different things.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cYesterday 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cWe have some conclusions that we can draw from that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cI\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Rea added that he learnt \u201cmany things\u201d during the weekend.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cBut that\u2019s for my crew and the technical people inside Honda,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cBut it\u2019s nice to ride with other bikes because you can really, especially riding so close, understand in which areas of the track they\u2019re better and relay that info to the crew and they can check data.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cThere\u2019s so many engineers now that control these bikes, so I\u2019m enjoying that side of it more and more.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Rea will be back in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crash.net\/wsbk\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">World Superbike<\/a> race action for HRC at the Dutch Round on 17\u201319 April as Jake Dixon continues to recover from injury.<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p> Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Although he didn\u2019t finish in the top-10 in any of the races, Jonathan Rea says he was able&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593326,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,9400,52088,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-593325","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-honda-hrc","11":"tag-jonathan-rea","12":"tag-motor","13":"tag-motor-sports","14":"tag-motosport","15":"tag-motosports","16":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}