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In Race 2 most of the riders opted for the combination of Pirelli SC1 at the front and the new C0567 development SC1 at the rear. At the front, as in the Superpole Race, only Lorenzo Baldassarri and Roberto Tamburini fitted the standard SC2, while at the rear the official Kawasaki riders, Rea and Lowes, chose the development SC1 A1126 already used successfully in the Phillip Island races in 2022 and this year.
Toprak Razgatlioglu and Álvaro Bautista put on a fantastic duel on track, with the Turkish rider fending off the Spaniard's attacks in braking until a crash six laps from the end put him out of action.
At that point Álvaro Bautista had a clear path and went on to win alone.
The crash was very strange with a violent highside coming out of the corner which immediately appeared inexplicable, but the reason for the accident became clear a few moments later and the explanation was given later by Giorgio Barbier, Pirelli Moto Racing Director. Toprak later posted the photo on his Instagram profile.
“In WorldSBK Race 2, with the new rear specification C0567, we recorded three cases of blistering - said Barbier - Rea, Gardner and Razgatlioglu. For the first two, the blisters were very small and did not affect the performance and the race result, while in Razgatlioglu's case the tyre had two more marked blisters and the telemetry data showed a sudden deflation of the tyre. Even if the Yamaha rider's race pace was extremely high and the tyres of all the other riders show no sign of stress or wear, episodes of this type must not happen, so we will take care to analyse the three rear tyres that presented blisters in the laboratory to understand what could have triggered them".
Barbier then took the opportunity to also clarify the situation of the intermediate tyres, which had raised some doubts.
"Regarding an issue that caused some confusion among the fans yesterday: intermediate tyres, as well as wet or slick tyres, are available to all riders and teams in equal measure. In Race 1, by choice some teams had not asked to mount them on the rims or simply had mounted them in the garage and hadn't brought them to the grid, and that's why they didn't use them, not because Pirelli hadn't made them available to them. Today the unstable weather influenced the races, in particular that of WorldSSP: the podiums were the riders who, when it started to rain, decided to stay on track with slicks and take some risks".
