Jonathan Rea's bluntly honest take on debut Yamaha season

Jonathan Rea’s first Yamaha season in WorldSBK ended with the six-times World Champion down in 13th in the championship — it was a season more difficult than Rea anticipated.

However, there were at least moments — such as qualifying and the Superpole Race in Donington, and more recently the races in Estoril where Rea was able to fight for top-five positions — which offered more optimism.

“It was a challenge,” Rea said in review of his 2024 season.

“I knew that moving manufacturers was always going to be a challenge, but I didn’t expect to struggle and not find my feet as fast as I expected, to be honest.

“We had some glimpses of showing our full potential, so it’s now a case of, after a long season of working with the team, understanding the positives and negatives of the combination of me and the bike, [and] trying to put everything together this off-season.

“Honestly, Yamaha are working really hard in the background now to continue developing the Yamaha R1, so I’m looking forward to go to the next test and understand exactly our level, introduce the new parts, and keep working towards Phillip Island in 2025.”

Rea said that work was being done across the R1 platform in order to find additional performance.

“We’re working all over the bike, from performance, the engine, electronics, chassis — it’s like anyone, it’s constant development,” he said.

“It seems like in Superbike now, if you stand still you get left behind.

“Now is a good chance for us to move the bike forwards and create a good feeling for me to push on the limit.

“Superbike is stacked, it’s so competitive. I remember, Jerez, I think I qualified on row five but I was two-tenths from row two. If you lose this one, two, three tenths when you’re not super-competitive, it can put you really at the back of the list.

“So, just trying to work on a lot of things from my side and try to get that feeling to really push on the limit.”

The six-times champion is now putting the onus on Yamaha to improve before the end of this off-season period in order to deliver better results in 2025.

“This year was just [about] understanding the bike,” Rea said.

“Now is the critical time for the team and Yamaha as a manufacturer to work because they have a lot of data from this season, a lot of comments, so hopefully I can make the bike a little bit more ‘mine’ and we can increase the performance of the bike overall to fight with everybody else.”