New Kid On The Block: 16-year-old Garrett Gerloff had
the paddock shaking their heads with his stunning
performances at New Jersey Motorsports Park.
Has any road racer ever made a more impressive professional debut than
Garrett Gerloff?
A little over a month after his
16th birthday, the sweet-natured
and humble Texan had heads
shaking up and down pit row with
a display of speed and maturity
that hadn’t been seen in some
time.
Riding a Graves Yamaha with
Monster Energy backing, Gerloff
won his first Pro race by thrashing
the Supersport field on Saturday,
setting lap times that would have
put him at the front of the Daytona
SportBike class. But it was Sun-
day’s race that sent shockwaves
through the paddock. Gerloff
didn’t win - the victory went to
ANT-Racing.com/STAR School’s
James Rispoli, the New York dirt
tracker who finished a distant
second to Gerloff on Saturday.
But in chasing Rispoli, Gerloff
laid down a series of four laps, all
of which were under the Daytona
SportBike qualifying time set by
Yamaha Extended Service/Pat
Clark Sports’ Tommy Aquino and
the best of which, a 1: 24.059,
was well under Cameron Beau-
bier’s class-leading 1: 24.727 in
the second race.
“He would’ve pulled a couple
seconds on us,” Monster Energy
Graves Yamaha’s Josh Herrin
said after winning Sunday’s Day-
tona SportBike race.
Sunday’s SuperSport race
was red-flagged on the 15th of
19 laps, preventing Gerloff from
trying to sweep the weekend.
By then he’d pushed the front so
hard that he was having front-tire
problems, which isn’t a problem
most 16-year-olds face. Rispoli
won the race from Gerloff and
Hayden Gillim, who was half a
second back when scoring re-
verted to the 14th lap.
Team owner Chuck Graves,
for one, wasn’t surprised by Ger-
loff’s performance.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “If
you look at the lap times that he
and Jake Lewis - Jake Lewis is
another guy Earl Hayden’s helping out - have been doing at the
WERA races, and if we compare
those to AMA times there was no
BY HENNY RAY ABRAMS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NELSON & RILES
