WorldSBK Barcelona SP Race Results | Alvaro Bautista strolls to tenth victory

Alvaro Bautista inched closer to the 2022 WorldSBK Championship title with a comfortable second victory of the weekend in the Superpole Race at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

After steamrolling his way to glory in Race 1 on Saturday, Bautista was in similarly commanding form in the Sunday morning sprint as he controlled the pace to take victory over Jonathan Rea and Alex Lowes.

The Spaniard completed much of the hard work in the first few seconds of the race by dismissing his fifth place on the grid to slice slice through the front row starters to get the hole-shot into Turn 1.

From here, Bautista’s lead was never threatened by either Rea or Lowes, the latter having gotten through on his title challenging team-mate for second at the end of the opening lap.

With Ducati out front pulling away, Lowes looked comfortable keeping Rea at bay in arguably his most competitive race performance of the season, but he put up no resistance to his fellow KRT rider when the Ulsterman pulled alongside to pass at the start of the final lap.

Having yo-yo’d up and down the order in a first race hampered by tyre problems towards the end, Toprak Razgatlioglu found the going tougher from eighth on the grid this time.

Famed for his aggressiveness during the first turns - a tactic that has often negated any lowly starting spot previously - the Turk instead went the other way initially to find himself in tenth coming out of Turn 2.

Nevertheless, after two of his rivals ahead - pole sitter Iker Lecuona and team-mate Andrea Locatelli - were eliminated in a collision at Turn 10 on lap one, Razgatlioglu quickly made it back up to fifth place.

However, his hopes of challenging for the podium would be scuppered by a stubborn Michael Ruben Rinaldi, the Italian keeping the defending champion at bay until lap five when Razgatlioglu made a move stick for fourth into Turn 1. It would be as far as he could go though, the Turk losing ground to title rival Bautista overall but in a better position to fight for Race 2.

Rinaldi came round for fifth place, ahead of Philipp Oettl, who put in a fine ride as the top privateer to pick off a busy mid-pack of rivals and secure sixth place on the Go Eleven Ducati.

The best result of his rookie season to date, the German got the better of Honda’s Xavi Vierge in seventh and Scott Redding in eighth, the Englishman rider putting Saturday’s crash behind him with a solid finish on what has been a torrid weekend for the German manufacturer.

He was followed by stablemate Loris Baz on the Bonovo BMW after winning a drag race to the line with Race 1 podium winner Garrett Gerloff, the Frenchman picking up the final point - and a spot on the third row - for Race 2.

Gerloff might have finished higher but for a mistake into Turn 1 on lap six that dropped him down the order, the American having been sucked into a wilder mistake by Axel Bassani, who had ventured even further off course to leave him 16th at the flag.

2022 WorldSBK Championship | Barcelona, Spain | Superpole Race Results