Jonathan Rea is a superbike phenomenon, breaking one record after another. Will he beat Hanika’s track record?

24.06.2021 08:14

British rider Jonathan Rea is rewriting the WorldSBK records. The most valuable one is undoubtedly his six world titles in a row, unbroken since 2015. Czech fans can enjoy the arts of this phenomenal rider live during 6th to 8th August, when the MOTUL FIM Superbike World Championship will be hoste dat Autodrom Most. Will Rea break track record, which is held by local Karel Hanika, with the time of 1:35,417? The record was set during September 2019, during the Alpe Adria International Motorcycle championship.


Hanika is the reigning vice-champion of the Endurance World Championship. At the end of last season, he participated in the Supersport World Championship, which is run as a support series of the prestigious WorldSBK. Czech rider is aiming to be present during the August race weekend in Most. Whether he will take place on the grid will be decided soon. Should he take the sport on the grid, he will join the duo of talented young riders Oliver König and Petr Svoboda, who will start in the WorldSSP300 class.

The Most circuit with a tradition of almost forty years is popular among riders. It is 4212 meters long, with 21 turns, from which 9 left and 12 right. The longest straight is 792 meters long, the shortest 150 meters. The track is 12 to 14 meters wide, it is driven in clockwise direction. At the beginning of August, it will be clear how it will fit the the WorldSBK riders.

As it turns out from the very beginning of the new season of the MOTUL FIM Superbike World Championship, search for an effective weapon against the leader of the championship, Jonathan Rea, will not be easy. In three races so far, Rea has triumphed three times on three weekends, once taking silver, four times bronze place. So far, podium places have earned him 149 points, which currently means a lead with a gap of 20 points over Toprak Razgatlioglu from Turkey.

34-year-old Rea, a Kawasaki rider, also dominates the performance tables of the championship, which has been run since 1988, as well as a number of other parameters. He turned his up-to-date 312 starts into 103 victories. These will most likely continue to grow.

For comparison: second place behind Rea in the number of races won and the number of titles in the Superbike World Championship is held by Briton Carl Fogarty, who won fifty-nine times between 1992 and 1999 and is a four-time champion of the series. The best of Rea's current rivals are another Briton Scott Redding and already mentioned Toprak Razgatlioglu, Redding has won seven times, Razgatlioglu six times.

The stats of races won in one season are also dominated by Jonathan Rea. In 2018 and 2019, he was at the top of the podium seventeen times. However, this triumph is shared, the same performance was demonstrated in the 1991 season by the American Doug Polen, two-time world champion.

Rea is also unrivaled in the number of podiums achieved. During his fourteen-year career in WorldSBK, he collected 193 of them. He is followed by Australian Troy Corser, with 130 podium finishes in the races, followed by Japanese Noriyuki Haga with 116 podium places. Not surprisingly, Rea also dominates the podium standings per season. In 2019, he enjoyed the podium ceremony thirty-four times. He significantly outpaced the American Colin Edwards, who managed to do it twenty-five times in the 2002 season.

Rea also recorded the largest number of hat tricks in the WorldSBK. He managed to win all three races of one weekend twenty-three times. Brit also proves his dominance by the number of fastest laps. He established it in 70 races during his career.


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