Northern Ireland’s Jonathan Rea will start tomorrow’s two fourth round World Superbike championship races from the front row of the grid after setting the third fastest time in this afternoon’s Superpole sessions at Monza.

Pole position was taken by local rider Max Biaggi, as 24-year-old Rea worked diligently with his crew to find an improved race set-up for the two 18-lap races around the 5.777km picturesque and historic Monza circuit just north of Milan in northern Italy.

After setting the pace in yesterday’s opening free practice session, Rea has spent subsequent sessions concentrating on optimizing the tyre wear on his Castrol Honda CBR1000RR to last each of tomorrow’s two races.

His team-mate Ruben Xaus just missed out on a lap that was quick enough to guarantee a place with the final 16 riders to contest Superpole. The Spaniard will consequently start from 17th position on the grid.

Jonathan Rea – P3

To be honest, I’m very happy and savouring the moment to be on the front row here because we’ve had a bit of an up and down weekend so far. We’ve been working really, really hard for tomorrow’s races and the tyre choice is critical again here with the temperature going up and down. The front row is really important to get away with the front group, which will be quite a group I think. A big ambition of mine is to stand on the podium here at Monza – it would be really special, so I’ll be trying my hardest to achieve that tomorrow.


Ruben Xaus – P17

Of course, it’s been a disappointing day and there’s not really much I can say. I feel OK on the bike but we tested a few things today to achieve a good basic set-up and went in the wrong direction. We’re all in it together and, as a team, we are all working very hard and we must take the bad times together like we take the good times. We still had some brake problems today, but also some traction issues. We weren’t so far away yesterday and maybe we should have spent more time to get into a rhythm with that before trying so hard to improve it some more. Anyway, we’ll see if we can find something in warm-up tomorrow and, of course, I will be trying my best in both the races.

Ronald ten Kate – team manager

We’ve been spending a lot of time this weekend working with Jonathan on used race tyres in various combinations, so we never really knew how fast he was going to be on a soft tyre for a single fast lap. But he was really quite good at it! The front row is important here at Monza because we don’t want to let the leading group get away, so we’re hoping he can hop on to the high-speed train with three or four other riders. Unfortunately, things are not quite so good on Ruben’s side of the garage. We can’t expect a miracle overnight but we’ve got some other things to try in warm-up tomorrow that we hope can propel him forward in the races.