Jonathan Rea fired up for Valencia

Jonathan Rea is targeting an improvement in his qualifying performance at this weekend’s third round of the World Supersport championship at Valencia.

Rea showed impressive race pace at Phillip Island in round two of the series at the beginning of March when he came from over five seconds back place to finish fifth less than a second off the lead but believes improving his pace on a single qualifying lap is the key success.

At the official test at Valencia two weeks ago Rea was once again consistently fast on race tyres and has been working with his team to change the settings on the bike to help be fast on a single fast lap.

He said: “The test at Valencia gave us a really good base setting and I’m happy with our race set-up.

“We’re working to get the bike better when we put in a new tyre.

“At the moment I’m happiest when the tyre is six or seven laps old, but it’s not an option to go out in qualifying on an old tyre because there is so much depth of field that you just won’t be able to cut it.”

Rea currently sits ninth in the championship standings after crashing out of round one at Qatar before claiming fifth in round two.

Despite his round one no score he‘s just 22 points off the lead and believes that consistency is the key to this years championship.

He said: “In the first two races some of the big hitters have DNF’d. Everyone out there wants to win the race but we’re already seeing that consistency is a big factor.”