WORLD SUPERBIKE CHAMPIONSHIP
VOL. 51 ISSUE 8 FEBRUARY 25, 2014 P39
"I thought I could win," the
Italian said. "At one point of the
race I really thought I could. With
the team we decided that I had
to ride as smooth as possible,
because we already know that
after 15 laps problems would
have come. So the first 12 laps
I rode calm. I could have gone
a lot faster, but I would have de-
stroyed the rear tires. But it did
not. I'm happy. We knew our lim-
its, but this was the best race of
the dry for Panigale. I crossed
the line seven seconds from the
Briefly...
plained that there is up to 25 minutes
less of track time now that Superpole
is in only one part for the top 10 rid-
ers, and one part for eight of the 10
Superpole riders behind them. The
two riders who pass from Superpole
1 to Superpole 2 with the elite top 12
getting an extra rear tire from their al-
location. Some riders sat out the wet
or damp sessions to conserve their
sticker allocation.
The rulebook finally arrived with only
a few days to spare for the start of
the year, but the homologation list
came only on Friday evening, mean-
ing that bikes like the new CBR SP,
the EBR 1190RX and the MV F4 had
been running in practice without any
public homologation announcement.
Dorna is confident that there will
be 14 rounds of the World Super-
bike Championship this season as
planned, although there is still no
official mention of the word Qatar
as the final round. Phakisa, Laguna
Seca and Sepang are all subject to
contract, but the Laguna round has
been adversely affected by financial
and AMA complications. If the La-
guna race happens it will feature an
AMA card of races, although there
is no AMA round scheduled for that
weekend yet.
After the weekend had started at
Phillip Island, the EBR team got un-
lucky when Geoff May, who had
got himself to within respectable dis-
tance of the leading riders in prac-
tice, fell and broke his left collarbone
on Saturday.
(Above) Jonathan Rea (65) fared
the better of the two factory Hondas
with his sixth and fifth place finish-
es. Leon Haslam (91) crashed out of
race one and was sixth in race two.
(Left) Loris Baz (76) finished third in
the shortened second race. Laverty
(58) suffered an engine failure that
brought out the red flag in race two.
