JONATHAN REA TAKES TITLE NO.5
2019 Rea goes one better than Foggy to become the King of WSB
‘This looked like it wasn’t going to happen but we never gave up’
The 2019 season looked to be all about one man – and it wasn’t Jonathan Rea! At the start of the season, Alvaro Bautista on the new Panigale V4 R blew the competition away, taking eleven straight wins in an emphatic display that saw everyone assume the title was his. Everyone except Jonathan Rea, that was.
Using his head and securing second place in nearly every round, when the Spaniard’s run eventually ended and Jonathan took the win in Imola (after his longest losing streak since joining Kawasaki!) he was only 43 points behind with 496 still up for grabs. Two more wins for Bautista in Jerez were followed by a crash, showing the Ducati rider was human after all, but it was in Misano where the tables turned.
After taking the second race win, Rea began to pile the pressure on Bautista as he went on to score six successive wins. In response, Bautista’s challenge fell apart with a series of crashes and poor results and when he left Laguna Seca, Rea had turned around an improbable swing of 142 points. A dominant run then saw Rea take his fifth WSB title with two rounds to spare, making him the most successful WSB racer ever, ahead of Carl Fogarty (although Foggy is still King of the Jungle...). “This has been the toughest season of my life both from a mental and mechanical point of view,” Rea said when he lifted the trophy. “This looked like it wasn’t going to happen but we never gave up. All of those second places at the beginning of the year won this championship.”