PRE-SEASON TESTING WorldSBK 2023 kicks off at Philip Island , February 24 and there ’ s extensive official preseason testing ahead of Round One with three two-day sessions at Jerez , the final one having just run at the time of writing , two days at Portimao at the end of January and then , most significantly , two days at Phillip Island just days before Round One . It ’ s a mistake to draw too many conclusions from the early test sessions but , for what it ’ s worth , coming out of the third Jerez session , Razgatlioglu topped the timing charts despite a fairly significant crash on day two . Rea and Bautista took second and third respectively with less than two-tenths of a second covering first through third . Rinaldi and Lowes held fourth and fifth with , impressively , Superbike rookie Aegerter in sixth ahead of Locatelli . Ex-MotoGP duo Petrucci and Gardner also
managed to lay down times which put them in the top ten with Petrucci eighth and Gardner tenth . The Honda and BMW teams will be looking to improve in the Portimao and Phillip Island tests ; Lecuona was best of the HRC boys with the ninth-fastest lap at Jerez , and Baz was best of the BMW crew with an eleventh place . Factory BMW riders Redding and van der Mark were twelfth and sixteenth . Gerloff was sixteenth , Sykes was seventeenth and his Jerez test ended prematurely following a crash late on day two . By the time this preview goes live , the Portimao test days will have run and we ’ ll be staring down the barrel at those final two days of testing at Phillip Island , followed , just a couple of days later , by Round One at the iconic Australian track which can throw every type of weather at the teams across the three days of racing . We can ’ t wait .
38 KIWI RIDER