Double delight for Chaz Davies at Laguna Seca

Despite the Kawasaki pairing of Tom Sykes and Jonathan Rea giving chase they were unable to reel in the Aruba.it Racing Ducati rider who romped to the victory, his 6 WorldSBK win and the 2 for the Panigale machine.

Indeed, Davies was never realistically challenged as he quickly broke the slipstream of the bikes behind over the opening revolutions, before being allowed to escape further as the race progressed. Rea’s third place is ironically his “worst” result of the season.

Jordi Torres (Aprilia) makes up the rest of the front row.

Davies was comfortably clear of this scrap though and cruised to his second win of the year and with Leon Haslam crashing out of sixth with five laps to go, the 25 points were enough to leapfrog him ahead of the Aprilia rider in the championship standings.

Alex Lowes rode well to finish sixth for Suzuki ahead of Sylvain Guintoli, whose hopes of retaining his World Superbike crown are already mathematically over.

In race two, the podium spots stayed the same as Davies was dominant once again over Sykes and Rea. Though he quickly came back to fifth place, he would find himself bottled up behind the stubborn Jordi Torres for 13 laps before eventually overtaking the Spaniard for fourth. Michael van der Mark followed his PATA Honda teammate home in eighth with Leandro Mercado and Leon Camier rounding out the top ten.

Althea Racing had a hard race with Niccolo Canepa suffering a technical problem at turn two on the opening lap.

Rea leads the championship standings on 407 points, with Sykes second on 282 and Davies third on 263, ahead of the 10th round of the series in Malaysia in two weeks’ time.