One of Honda’s brightest stars will get his big break on the international stage next week when he lines up as a wild-card rider alongside the likes of Valentino Rossi and Nicky Hayden in the MotoGP class at the British motorcycle Grand Prix.20-year-old Jonathan Rea is currently riding for the HM Plant Honda Racing team in the Bennetts British Superbike Championship where he’s in third place overall. Just three weeks before the British GP, which takes place on June 24th he was contacted by Team KR and offered a ride on their second MotoGP machine.The Banbury-based team currently use Honda’s 800cc RC212V engine in their own chassis and run former champion Kenny Roberts Junior in the team, although in a bid to speed up development of the bike they’ve previously drafted in Roberts Senior’s other son Kurtis for the previous two MotoGP rounds.Rea, who comes from Ballymena, said he was surprised and delighted to get called-up for his home GP. He said: "I’d just switched my mobile phone on after getting off a plane when I got the call from Neil Tuxworth, my HM Plant team boss. I was so surprised – and over the moon! I’m going to do my best, learn from the experience and hopefully enjoy it."Legendary racer and team-boss Kenny Roberts Senior said: "We’re looking forward to seeing him on the bike. We need to keep moving young talent into MotoGP but also his information will help us develop the bike as we’re a long way behind some of the other teams."This will be the second big international break for Rea’s talents as he and HM Plant team-mate Ryuichi Kiyonari recently won the Suzuka 300km race in Japan which is a pre-cursor to the prestigious Suzuka 8-Hour race which takes place on Sunday July 29th. The 300km race is seen as a form book for the 8-Hour which is the most important race in the Japanese calendar.Rea is a successful product of Honda’s policy to identify and back talent at a young age. After a successful motocross career in which he was 60cc British Champion in 1997, he made the switch to road-racing in 2003 in the British 125cc GP class with the Honda-backed Red Bull Rookie team. In 2005, he made his debut in the Bennetts British Superbike class with the Red Bull team on a Honda Fireblade scoring a pole position in his first year in the class and last year, at 19-years of age he was the youngest-ever highest finishing rider in the series’ history when he finished third in the overall Championship standings.