Portimao WorldSBK poleman Jonathan Rea has been thrown a curveball in Portugal this afternoon as Pirelli have withdrawn the Type A tyre he has been working with from the weekend’s allocation.

Rea has done most of his lap with that rear hoop but will now have to go into this afternoon’s race on one of the other softer compounds. Pirelli have stated the tyre has been withdrawn on safety grounds.

“It was a brand-new development solution focused on maximum performance, thanks to the availability onsite of our mobile laboratory we noticed it was less stable in terms of wear in comparison to the other soft solution and so we decided to withdraw it even because the other soft solution (W0575) is perfectly able to do the race. It’s just an extremely safety reason although there were not concrete problems,” Pirelli’s Matteo Giusti told BSN.