PETRONAS MIE Racing Honda riders Toba and Pawi narrowly avoid an early multi-rider incident before making up ground to cross the line nineteenth and twenty-second in today’s first SSP race at Most.

The Autodrom Most is the stage for round six of the WorldSSP championship this weekend. with Saturday bringing the first of the weekend’s SBK races for the PETRONAS MIE Racing Honda Team and riders Kaito Toba and Khairul Idham Pawi.

With only limited track time on Friday, the riders tried to make the most of the short warm-up session on Saturday morning. This gave them a final opportunity to ready themselves for the afternoon’s 19-lap race. 

Friday’s qualifying results that Toba and Pawi lined up one behind the other, on the eighth (twenty-second) and ninth (twenty-fifth) row of the grid for Race 1. The riders got off the line well but were unfortunately immediately caught up in an incident that saw four riders crash out through Turn 1. The PETRONAS MIE Racing Honda pair did well to stay upright but dropped to the back of the field after running off track to avoid the chaos. Placing twenty-third on lap 3, Pawi continued to hold this position for the best part of the race before moving up one position to cross the line twenty-second. Toba soon made up two positions from twenty-seventh, the Japanese rider able to establish a rhythm that was significantly quicker than that of his closest rivals over the first half of the race. Up into twentieth by lap ten, Kaito continued to push but the gap that had meanwhile opened up in front of him prevented any further progress in terms of outright result, the Japanese rider finishing Race 1 in nineteenth position.