Jonathan Rea will start tomorrow’s two 12th round World Superbike championship races from the second row of the grid after setting the fifth fastest time in the Superpole qualifying session this afternoon at the Nurburgring in Germany.

The Honda World Superbike Team rider was fastest over the two regulation qualifying sessions, but the 25-year-old felt that he didn’t get the best use of his Pirelli qualifiers during the final Superpole outing.

Pole position was taken by Italian Max Biaggi, with Tom Skyes, Marco Melandri and Eugene Laverty completing the front row of the grid for tomorrow’s two 20-lap races around the 5.137km Nurburgring circuit.

Rea’s Honda team-mate, Hiroshi Aoyama, was unable to compete in today’s Superpole session but the Japanese ace made a significant improvement in his lap time during the second free practice session and is confident of two strong performances tomorrow.

Jonathan Rea – P5, 1m54.300s

Today was OK and we have an OK pace but, when we put the qualifier in, the fuel mapping was maybe a little bit too conservative for that kind of tyre so I don’t think I used it as much as I could. Overall the bike’s not so bad and we’re definitely in the ball park. We still have a few things to try in morning warm-up to make our race pace a couple of tenths faster, but I’m enjoying riding more than before. I like the circuit here but they’re going to be two long hard races. Fifth is the right side of the grid but it seems like the tyre wear is going to be crucial. We need to make sure that we’ve covered all our bases when the tyre drops off, because it’s going to be critical for the last few laps.

Hiroshi Aoyama – P19, 1m57.101

We improved almost two seconds from yesterday but the others also went faster. We can still improve tomorrow and, although the grid position is not very good, we’ll see what’s happening going into turn one! I think there are a lot of opportunities to pass in turn one and the races are 20 laps so we’ll see what happens. We’ll adjust the bike a little bit in the morning to check a few things and then we are ready for the races.

Pieter Breddels – technical co-ordinator

Hiroshi made good progress today. We improved the setting and he improved his lap time quite a bit. Unfortunately, that was only in the afternoon free practice session, when he was 13th, and that was a little bit too late to qualify for Superpole. With Jonathan we got fifth and we were a little disappointed not to get on the front row. Then again, fifth is pretty good but we’re struggling in some sections – just looking for a few tenth on race pace. If we can find those I think we can run for the podium tomorrow. Normally we run pretty well here at the Nurburgring, so we’ll see.

Pole position : 1m55.855s (162.428Km/h) Max Biaggi, Aprilia
Circuit record lap : 1m55.392s (160.264Km/h) Jonathan Rea, Honda, 2010
Circuit Best Lap : 1m54.144s (162,016Km/h) Carlos Checa, Ducati, 2011

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