SBK | Disappointment Rea: “It’s a sh…! I’m starting to suffer mentally.”

He left Kawasaki to look for new stimuli and, why not, return to the top step of the podium. However, Jonathan Rea’s adventure with Yamaha is proving to be more complicated than expected, because to date the six-time world champion has not yet managed to find the right feeling with the R1 and the frustration of not obtaining the desired results begins to get bigger and bigger.

At Misano it was no different, a complicated qualifying led the Northern Irishman to start from 15th place, with a fall in Race 1 which caused him a graze on his left wrist. A succession of difficult moments for the six-time world champion, who after the tests carried out on this track expected something more from the recently concluded weekend: “I’m not saying that the tests were super good, but they weren’t bad. The lap times were done with the qualifying tyre, because before that I was outside the top 10.”

“But the weekend didn’t go as I expected, in qualifying I got a yellow flag and then there was the crash in Race 1. It’s not good to be only on the fifth row on the grid. Toprak Razgatlioglu is currently very strong, but the second group behind the two factory Ducatis was also very fast. You have to be in the top positions to keep up. It wasn’t my case,” explained Rea at the end of the Misano weekend.

The crash in Race 1 inevitably affected the two races on Sunday, especially the second heat. Therefore, from Donington we will start from scratch to try to make a change in this season which has very little positive: “I didn’t have any information about Sunday’s race due to the crash on Saturday, with the SCQ the Superpole Race was chaos. In Race 2 the only goal was to get to the finish line and build a base, because my confidence is very low at the moment. The sensations on the bike do not represent the direction I want to take with the Yamaha. We have to start from scratch, trying not to be influenced too much by the results obtained so far. Obviously we can improve, I expect to do so, but we have to take a big step. First I have to feel good with the bike, with the team.”

But how hard will it be to start from scratch when we are already at the fifth round of the season at Donington? Rea asks herself the same question and the answer that she struggles to arrive brings with it only anger and frustration: “It’s not a stupid question, it’s a question that I ask myself too. It’s shit for me… I’m starting to feel it mentally. I try to be positive, but I’m struggling. I always talk about the light at the end of the tunnel theory, but it’s really hard to see this light. The truth, however, is that sport is like this. All you need is a good day on the bike or a breakthrough with the setup to start arriving. It becomes complicated not to question yourself, because the other Yamaha riders are doing an excellent job, but I can’t and I have to keep asking the team what I need and I feel that they have to react to what I say.”