Australia WorldSBK: Toprak: Pit stop mishap cost 5 seconds – ‘that’s racing’ |

After playing catchup to the likes of Kawasaki and Ducati’s newly crowned Alvaro Bautista in free practice and qualifying, the 2021 world champion began the soaking wet opening laps from fourth on the grid.

The Pata Yamaha rider fought his way through to lead by lap 5 of 22 and was right behind Jonathan Rea when the pair both dived into the pits for slicks on lap 10.

While the timing proved correct, allowing Rea and Razgatlioglu to gain a comfortable advantage over the late-stopping Alex Lowes and Bautista, an issue when fitting the slick front tyre cost Razgatlioglu five seconds.

That allowed Rea to escape and the British star went on to claim a 6.2s victory.

“This weekend didn’t have a good start but anyway my team was working to have a better bike. Now I’m happy. We finished the race on the podium,” Razgatlioglu said.

“It was a strange race for me. It was my first race like this. I felt too much spinning on the [wet] rear and after I was not pushing on the tyre. I saw that Jonny was also not pushing.

“Then I saw he entered to the box and I followed him directly. My team made a small mistake during the pit stop, they struggled to put the front tyre so we lost almost five seconds.

“But anyway, this is racing, this is motorsport. We tried our best. We are here, in second place. Now I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”

By only losing five points to Rea, Razgatlioglu still holds a comfortable 32-point advantage over the Kawasaki rider in their fight for title runner-up.

Meanwhile, Razgatlioglu and Bautista will go into Sunday’s final two races still tied on 14 wins for the season.

Team-mate Andrea Locatelli claimed fourth place, for the third race in a row, crossing the line 2.9s behind Lowes after overtaking Bautista in the closing stages.

“Today was a fun race for the fans and for us because to stop to have a flag-to-flag was interesting,” Locatelli said. “In the end we got fourth position so I think we can be happy. It’s a good result.

“I was fighting with Alex until the end [to] maybe finish in third position. My team did a really good job for the flag-to-flag, so I want to thank them. I’m really happy about today and about this race.

“We’ll try again tomorrow, and we’ll try to improve to try to stay closer to the front because we want to try to get a podium. This is the target.”

GRT’s Garrett Gerloff made it three Yamahas in the top six.

“Complicated is the right word to describe this race,” said the American. “It was raining really hard after the Superpole session. I honestly didn’t think that it was going to be a dry race at all. But then, we were sitting on the grid, the sun came out and the wind was hard. I was thinking ‘alright this is going to dry’ and it did pretty quickly.

“In the race, I made a decent start and it didn’t feel too bad in the rain but honestly, I didn’t feel too fantastic either and I lost some ground. But staying around sixth, seventh place and then when the track started to…