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The second and final day of testing at Jerez is complete for the World Superbike series, and though the names at the top are familiar, the order is a little less clear cut than it was yesterday.

Jonathan Rea is still fastest, the reigning world champion a tenth quicker than anyone else on track, and one of only two riders to drop into the 1’39s.

But behind the Kawasaki rider is not his teammate Tom Sykes, but Milwaukee Aprilia’s Lorenzo Savadori. The Italian posted an impressive time in the afternoon, jumping to finish between the two Kawasakis.

Tom Sykes ended the day in third, four tenths behind teammate Rea. Both Kawasaki men fell during the day, not the only riders to crash, as Althea BMW riders Jordi Torres (WSBK) and Marco Faccani (STK1000) also fell, the two BMW men injuring their shoulders in the fall. 

The 2017 season is now officially underway, as bikes roll back out for testing. First up are the denizens of the World Superbike series, with most of the major teams getting underway at a sunny, but not especially warm, Jerez de la Frontera circuit.

A good selection of teams are present, including the Kawaski, Honda, Yamaha, Ducati factory teams, the Milwaukee Aprilia squad – now resplendent in their official 2017 colors – the Althea BSB team, and Puccetti Kawasaki.

The WorldSBK riders are joined by the JG Speedfit Kawasaki team from BSB, as well as a selection of World Supersport and Superstock 1000 riders.

Reigning champion Jonathan Rea topped the timesheets, starting the new season where he left off the previous one. Rea was a quarter of a second faster than his Kawasaki teammate Tom Sykes, and six tenths quicker than Chaz Davies on the Aruba.it Ducati. 

At long last, the FIM and Dorna have released a calendar for the World Superbike and World Supersport classes for 2014. The calendar features fourteen World Superbike events, but it is still very much a provisional list, with three of the fourteen still subject to contract, and the final race still marked as to be confirmed, with neither the location nor the country known.

One more slot in the 2013 MotoGP line up has been filled. Today, the Go & Fun Gresini team announced that they have signed Bryan Staring to ride the FTR Honda CRT bike for them in MotoGP in 2013. The 25-year-old left his native Australia to contest the Superstock 1000 Cup two years ago, winning races in 2012 and contending for the title all season, before ending in 4th.

Staring will continue to develop the Honda CBR1000RR-powered FTR machine contested by Michele Pirro in MotoGP in 2012. The name of Ryuichi Kiyonari had been linked to the ride, the former WSBK and MotoGP rider seen as one candidate to help HRC develop the production racer version of the Honda RC213V, which they intend to start selling for the 2014 MotoGP season.

As often happens when a major manufacturer decides to take a major leap by participating in a World Championship series the media goes crazy, which is exactly what happened when BMW Motorrad decided to descend on the tracks of the WSBK Championship. At the time, there were those who said that the BMW bike would have never been able to win a race, but the majority of the voices in and out of the paddock were pretty united in the concept that “if BMW decides it wants to win, sooner or later it will reach its objective,” something that as we have seen that happened in relatively little time.

After three seasons of “apprenticeship” that were necessary to get all the cogs working smoothly and to acquire the necessary experience on the track, BMW has finally reached the necessary competitive edge to reach the front of the pack, and from the beginning of the 2012 season the S1000RR has established itself as a contender at the top of the leaderboards. BMW Motorrad for the third year in a row, has given its most accredited journalists the possibility to try its racebikes mid-season, and we were clearly not going to let this opportunity slip by us.

The first time we were given this opportunity, it was BMW Motorrad Italy who gave us the handlebars of the S1000RR Superstock bike with which Andrea Badovini dominated the FIM Superstock Cup, and the success of this journalist test was so great that BMW Motorrad proper (the Germans) decided to open up the test to the official team bikes. In the meantime the Italian BMW team had debuted in WSBK, and so in 2011 we had the incredible opportunity to try all three types of racebikes.

So here we are in 2012, with the S1000RR which won its first victories in the WSBK Championship. More competitive and intriguing than ever and as has become a tradition, we are again ready to try the newest racing bikes with the famous BMW propeller on their tanks. The location may be different, as we now find ourselves in Misano Adriatico (which should make the Monza track haters among us quite happy), but everything else remains basically the same.

For the format, there are now four bikes to try. The warm-up laps to learn the track will be done on a stock S1000RR street bike, followed by a ride on the Superstock bike belonging to Sylvain Barrier and Lorenzo Baroni. Following these we get some laps aboard the BMW Motorrad factory bikes of Leon Haslam and Marco Melandri, and the day on the BMW Motorrad Italia machines that are campaigned by Ayrton Badovini and Michel Fabrizio.

Although Ducati will not be racing the 2012 Ducati 1199 Panigale in World Superbike this year, the new offering from Bologna found itself unsurprisingly on a revised homologation list this week for the World Superstock 1000 FIM Cup. While there will not be an official factory-backed WSTCK effort, taking up the cause to develop the Panigale on the track will be Effenbert-Liberty Racing, who will campaign two Ducati 1199 superbikes, with Brett McCormick and Federico Sandi at the helms of those machines.

World Superbike has released presumably its final revision to the Provisional World Superbike Championship Calendar (still with us here?). Announcing that Portimão will now be the penultimate round on the calendar, the Portuguese Circuit has been moved up to earlier in the year, and now makes Magny-Cours the production series’s final stop. Other changes include confirming Imola as the series’s second stop, which comes as no surprise to us.

What is surprising though is that this latest updated schedule by Infront and the FIM shows that the round originally scheduled for March 4th, rumored to be at Sepang, has been sacked. Originially intended to help World Superbike breakout from its Euro-centric schedule, the loss of a possible round in Malaysia certainly is a blow to the series in that regard, though there is some consolation in the fact that a round will be held in Russia, at the Moscow International Raceway. Check out the calendar after the jump.

Our good friends over at OmniMoto.it have shared with us today their experience riding BMW’s World Supersport and World Superbike S1000RR machinery. Getting a chance to flog the bikes of Sylvain Barrier, Lorenza Zanetti, Ayrton Badovini, James Toseland, Leon Haslam, and Troy Corser around the famous Monza circuit in Italy, OmniMoto’s Lorenzo Gargiulo certainly had a tough day in the office. Even translated into English, this Italian bike tester is well…very Italian in his assessments, but we think the subtle differences between the Superstock, satellite Superbike, and factory Superbike shine through in his writing. Enjoy. — Ed.

There are opportunities in the moto-journalism profession that are to be jumped on, and this is one of them. I could tell you the story about how today, in order to reach Monza to try the three motorcycles I’m about to write about, I slept only 3 hours, or how I had to work on a Saturday, and how I had to somehow fit in 1,000 other obligations and make up a lot of excuses in order to free my schedule, but the basic fact is the following: the opportunity to ride on a track, three SWBK motorcycles is so overwhelming that everything else became of secondary relevance.

So, when I received the invite from BMW to go ride around Monza with the very best of its motorcycles, my response was simply the most obvious one… I’m COMING!

After releasing a provisional calendar that left some venues to be determined, World Superbike has finally released its official schedule for the 2011 season. Leaving the European and Italian rounds empty back in October, we see Donington Park and Imola now official added to the roster. While the addition of the two historic circuits is certainly not the most surprising news, it atleast completes the WSBK calendar.