Alvaro Bautista dominates race two and joins Noriyuki Haga in race wins

It was a lot colder than race one with cloudy skies over the Catalan circuit with a chance of rain looming for the riders.

Alvaro Bautista started from pole position after dominating the rain impacted superpole race with both PATA Yamahas joining him on the front row. Iker Lecuona improved his qualifying position to fourth with Alex Lowes in fifth.

Jonathan Rea had to start from tenth place after crashing out on the last lap at turn one, the six-time world champion had a lot of work to do, especially with high tyre wear in mind.

On the warm up lap there was reported rain in all sectors with the white flags waving meaning that the riders could enter pitlane to change their tyres.

The light went out and it was Bautista who took the holeshot ahead of Toprak Razgatlioglu and Michael Ruben Rinaldi who started from eighth. He attacked Toprak at turn four, the Turkish rider then out-braked both Ducati’s into turn five to take the lead.

Tom Sykes and Hafizh Syahrin crashed out at turn four, the Malaysian was taken to the medical center.

The Aruba.it Ducati’s out powered Toprak down the home straight with Alex Lowes also moving through into the podium places. Rea had moved up into seventh in a HRC sandwich.

Lowes managed to brake extremely late at turn one to overtakes Rinaldi for second place, the KRT rider taking advantage of the conditions and began to close in on Bautista.

The rain had stopped and the Bologna bullets began to increase the pace with Bautista setting the fastest lap of the race and Rinaldi moving back into second place on the main straight.

Rinaldi had pulled out quite a big gap over Lowes in two laps, Toprak saw this and overtook the Brit into turn one to try and catch up to the Ducatis.

Rea passed Andrea Locatelli for fifth place with seven laps to go after sitting behind the Italian for the majority of the race.

On the last lap Xavi Vierge out-braked Locatelli to take sixth place from the Italian with Dominique Aegerter also lurking behind in eighth.

Alvaro Bautista took his eleventh win in twelve races, Toprak stole second place from Rinaldi out of the last corner, Toprak taking the maximum amount of points possible to limit the damage from Bautista.

Alex Lowes took fourth place to finish ahead of his team-mate Jonathan Rea with Xavi Vierge finishing in sixth ahead of Locatelli in seventh and Aegerter in eighth, Lecuona was ninth in Danilo Petrucci rounding out the top ten.

Alvaro Bautista extends his championship lead by a further five points, with his championship advantage now increasing to 69 points over Toprak Razgatlioglu which means we will lead the championship until at least Round Six at Donington Park.

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