SBK Portimao Test, Day 1 standings: Bimota ahead of Ducati and BMW as rain spoils the party

A busy morning of work, then a bit of rain, and finally the on-track action resumed: here’s how the first day of Superbike testing in Portimão went.

The weather forecasts from recent days raised fears that bad weather might spoil the test at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve, but the first hours went by without issues. Then some rain arrived and ended up disrupting the plans of the SBK teams, who had hoped to work without hiccups today. Even though conditions later improved and some riders went back out, there were no shake-ups in the standings compared to the times at 2 PM (CET). On Tuesday, the second and final day of running in Portugal, there should be no weather-related obstacles.

The fastest of all was Alex Lowes with the Bimota KB998 Rimini: best time of 1:40.622. The British rider showed good consistency with the Rimini-built bike and is looking to tomorrow to try to make further progress. The second fastest time today belongs to Nicolò Bulega, 532 thousandths off the leader and with a crash at Turn 14 that brought out a red flag. He suffered no physical consequences, but the Aruba.it Ducati team still had to work to fix his Panigale V4 R.

Third time for another Lowes, Sam, with the Elf Marc VDS team’s Ducati. As we already wrote, today was mainly about assessing his physical condition after the injury sustained at Phillip Island. Today’s performance confirms improvements, even if he’s not at 100%. Also in the top five are Miguel Oliveira’s BMW M 1000 RR and Iker Lecuona’s Panigale V4 R. Danilo Petrucci was seventh, behind test rider Michael van der Mark and ahead of Axel Bassani’s Bimota. Also in the top 10 were Jonathan Rea’s Honda and Remy Gardner’s Yamaha.