Sylvain Guintoli has closed the gap to Tom Sykes in the World Superbike Championship standings after taking a critical third win of the season in Magny-Cours, albeit only after team orders are employed by Aprilia.
Beginning in treacherous conditions, Guintoli was in fine form early on in the race to establish a five second lead, but similar to what occurred last time out in Jerez, Aprilia counterpart Melandri would recover from a poor getaway, slowly working his way up to second place before heading off in pursuit of Guintoli up the road.
Catching and immediately passing Guintoli with seven laps of the race remaining, Melandri appeared capable of streaking off into the lead, just as he did in Jerez.
However, on this occasion team orders would come into play with Aprilia signalling to Melandri – with an amusing ‘frown’ face on his pit-board – to allow his team-mate back through and stay behind him to the end of the race. Though seemingly reluctant at first, he would eventually pull over after two laps, handing Guintoli a lead he would hold to the chequered flag.
Main rival and WSBK leader Sykes, meanwhile, would endure a more eventful race, getting mired in a busy front pack early on as the riders jostled for both position and grip. Yo-yoing through the lead order, Sykes was running fifth coming into the final lap when Kawasaki employed a similar message to Loris Baz ahead in fourth to move over for his title challenging team-mate.
A shake of the head suggested Baz was not keen to adhere and though he would eventually cede his position, he made his point by only doing so awkwardly at the final corner.
Nonetheless, Sykes’ fourth place earns him an extra couple of digits to keep the margin to Guintoli at 19 points with now three races of the season remaining.
Between the Aprilias and Kawasakis, Jonathan Rea had a similarly eventful race, the Ulsterman leading into the opening bend, only to get sucked up by the lead group and drop to a low of sixth, before clawing his way back to third place, helped in part by Baz being told to drop a position after running off at Chateau d’Eau on three occasions. Rea’s team-mate completed a solid first race for PATA Honda by claiming a lonely sixth place finish.
The busy opening few laps would see Ducati in the mix too, but Chaz Davies would fall under braking for Adelaide and Davide Giugliano crashed off at Imola whilst running in third position and lapping quickly.
Giugliano, however, got going again and would fight his way back up to a noteworthy seventh place, ahead of the wild-card 3C Ducatis of Lorenzo Lanzi and Max Neukirchner. Even so, the German-based team stood to fare better since Xavi Fores was with the leading group when he crashed early on.
Sylvain Barrier led the EVO challenge in tenth place overall after class leader David Salom failed to start having injured his hand in an incident on Saturday. Niccolo Canepa finished 11th, with Jeremy Guarnoni, Claudio Corti, Bryan Staring and Fabien Foret picking up the remainder of the points.
Elsewhere, Suzuki endured a dismal start to the day with Alex Lowes retiring to the pit-lane early on, his bike seemingly not fixed after a crash in morning warm-up, while Eugene Laverty fell at turn one and couldn’t recover to the points.
