VOLUME 57 ISSUE 40 OCTOBER 6, 2020 P43
pronged, and Gerloff would,
himself, later crash and no-score.
With Rea gone and away from
it all to win his 98th WorldSBK
race after 21 laps of full concen-
tration, Baz was a clear second,
and Rea's sometime struggling
teammate Alex Lowes (KRT)
finished third.
Chaz Davies (Aruba.it Ducati)
was fourth and his teammate
Redding only fifth, his champion-
ship chances seeping away with
the rain.
Redding improved to fourth in
the short 10-lap Superpole race
on Sunday morning, but again Rea
was gone up front, Lowes improv-
ing one place on Saturday to take
second, for the first KRT 1-2 since
the opening round in Australia.
In third Michael van der Mark
(Pata Yamaha) helped his chances
of finishing third overall, but in a
great fight with Redding, which the
Dutchman would win, it did not aid
Ducati or Redding's cause at all.
Race two was to come to
Scott's rescue and the chief
architect of his survival to fight a
seemingly lost cause into the final
round was Redding himself.
He fairly lifted Rea out of his
way to take the lead and with Rea
suddenly now having to dig deep
in the final race's wet-but-drying
conditions, first Baz and then
crucially Davies ended his hopes
of making Estoril a holiday race.
It also spoiled the Kawasaki
party for Rea in another way as he
ended up stuck on 99 race wins
after his two Magny wins, but no
third. So, a potential "ton-up" wins
party, to add to the championship
title one whole round early, ended
up having no invites issued.
Not yet anyway.
After qualifying 1-2 in Super-
pole, Laverty and Sykes had tough
Sundays as well, with the BMW
riders barely scoring points com-
pared to their qualifying prowess
in the wet. Sykes cannot wait for
the new "M" model announced by
BMW for 2021 recently, with more
revs and peak power.
With the championship fight
between Rea and Redding
99.9% over in most people's
eyes, there is still a lot of ground
to be fought over in the battle for
third place overall.
Davies did himself no harm in
finishing third in the final French
race, as he has a 19-point lead
over van der Mark. Lowes is too
far behind to make it to third, but
he moved into fifth in France.
The Independent Riders'
trophy, which has taken on a
greater significance when a rider
like privateer points leader Rinaldi
has won a race and both Baz and
Gerloff have been on the main
podiums too, is not an irrelevance
this year.
In the main title fight, Rea has
340 points, Redding 281, Davies
222, VDM 203 and Lowes 179.
WorldSSP
A proven WorldSSP Champion
won each WorldSSP race, but
this time around it was only one
win for newly crowned champion
Andrea Locatelli (Bardahl Evan
Bros. WorldSSP Yamaha). He
was to fall on the warm-up lap
for race two and give a golden
red-white-and-blue tri-colored op-
portunity to local hero and 2017
World Champion (also for Ya-
maha at that time) Lucas Mahias
(Kawasaki Puccetti Racing).
Mahias had posted four con-
secutive second places in 2020,
Jonathan Rea cleared off
to the first of two wins in
France in race one.
