Reigning World Superbike Champion Jonathan Rea believes he suffered a little more than the competition with low grip at the Jerez track over the past two days but says he completed his programme of work in Spain.

The Isle of Man resident, who could this year become the first rider to defend a WSBK title since Carl Fogarty, ended the test down in seventh place as the top men went out on qualifiers in the final minutes of yesterday but Rea maintains he didn’t put in a sticky.

“It was a good test honestly but directly it was much harder to go faster. The track was really slow so and it looks like from our competition from November and January, with high grip we have an advantge as our bike is uding the track well but when the grip is lower, the track penalises us as well,” said Rea, speaking to bikesportnews.com at the track.

“We went through our programme, tried some new forks and played around with the balance of the bike to suit the conditions. We changed the engine character quite a lot, closer to where we had in in 2015 and I was able to go quite fast. It was a step-by-step thing, not getting carried away. We did some longer runs, and some distance on all the tyres but not a full race distance. We came here to do a lot of laps to understand the bike and get back to it physically.”