{"id":675628,"date":"2026-05-16T23:27:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T23:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/675628\/"},"modified":"2026-05-16T23:27:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T23:27:14","slug":"kawasaki-star-emerges-as-major-podium-threat-at-czech-worldsbk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/675628\/","title":{"rendered":"Kawasaki star emerges as major podium threat at Czech WorldSBK"},"content":{"rendered":"

Garrett Gerloff<\/a> admits his fourth place finish in Race 1 of the Czech WorldSBK was helped massively by red flags on the opening lap, after the American initially dropped to 14th off the start.<\/p>\n

Gerloff was caught rolling forwards just before the lights went out when the race got underway at the first attempt. However, red flags quickly came out when Danilo Petrucci<\/a> suffered a big fall at turn 13. That meant that riders would restart from their original grid places.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey held the light for a decent amount of time,\u201d Gerloff told WorldSBK.com. \u201cI slipped the clutch and held the brake at the same time, and I just thought that the light was about to go off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Garrett <\/p>\n

Garrett Gerloff, Czech WorldSBK 2026.<\/p>\n

\u00a9\u00a0Gold & Goose<\/p>\n

\u201cI let the clutch out but I didn\u2019t let the brake out, and so I smashed the bike into the [starting] box.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cThen, the light didn\u2019t go off so I went to pull the clutch back in, but then the light went off and everybody came around me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t nervous, I was just ready to go. The red flag did end up really helping us and we were able to do that restart. The second start was really good.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the race restarted, Gerloff managed to keep hold of his sixth place before moving up to fifth when Sam Lowes<\/a> and Alberto Surra<\/a> collided on lap four.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Kawasaki rider immediately took advantage as he dived to the inside of Surra for P4 at turn 20, on the same lap.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although Gerloff was unable to hunt down Yari Montella for the final spot on the podium, he kept the Barni rider in his sights for the entire race.<\/p>\n

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When told about the gap being less than three seconds to the podium, which has been dominated by Ducatis throughout 2026, Gerloff said: \u201cThat\u2019s good. I\u2019m always looking at distances from the winner but that was still far in this race.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAt least it seems like we\u2019re getting closer to where we want to be. I\u2019m really hoping that we\u2019ve found a spot where we want to be with the setup and that we can just keep taking that from race-to-race.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Garrett Gerloff admits his fourth place finish in Race 1 of the Czech WorldSBK was helped massively by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[325727,64,63,324706,586,6907,109804,34827,806,805,803,804,56672,228720,85,113816,215593],"class_list":["post-675628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-alberto-surra","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-autodrom-most-circuit","tag-czech-republic","tag-danilo-petrucci","tag-garrett-gerloff","tag-most","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-prague","tag-sam-lowes","tag-sports","tag-world-superbikes","tag-yari-montella"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}