Now, that is how you run a championship campaign. Maria Herrera (Terra & Vita GRT Yamaha WorldWCR) kept her head down in the second group at the Circuito de Jerez - Angel Nieto, taking a tidy P5 finish to officially seal her second consecutive Riders' Championship. With a 44-point cushion coming into the weekend, Herrera only needed six points to get the job done, and she executed the math to absolute perfection.
At the sharp end of the grid, Paola Ramos (Klint Racing Team) put on a ride for the ages. Starting from pole, she defended P1 into Turn 1 ahead of Herrera and Beatriz Neila (Ampito Crescent Yamaha). Neila climbed to P2 at Turn 6, and the pair began checking out from the rest of the field. But then the FIM Stewards dropped the hammer: an 8-lap warning sign turned into a double long lap penalty for a jump start at lights out.
By the time the penalty arrived, Ramos and Neila were nearly four and a half seconds up the road from the chasing pack. Ramos took her medicine, plunging as far as 3.4 seconds behind Neila. What followed next was simply stunning. The Madrid native found an entirely different gear, laying down a lap eight tenths faster than Neila and hunting her down before snatching P1 right back at Turn 6 on the final lap to claim her fourth WorldWCR victory alongside a new lap record of 1’50.998s. Beatriz Neila crossed just 0.167s behind to take P2—marking her 26th podium—and safely locked down second in the title standings.
Behind the frantic battle for the win, Roberta Ponziani (Klint Racing Team) fought her way back to the podium in P3, finishing 8.646s back and leading the second group home. Her teammate Natalia Rivera (Terra & Vita GRT Yamaha WorldWCR) delivered her best-ever result in the class with a brilliant P4, finishing just 8.907s off the winner.
Yvonne Cerpa (MotosCerpa-Gradara Corse) put together a stellar charge from a P13 grid start, only to suffer heartbreak when a track limits infringement at Turn 13 on the final lap dropped her down to P6. Chloe Jones (Monster Energy Crescent Yamaha) picked up P7, finishing a mere tenth and a half behind Cerpa to extend her impressive top-ten streak to nine races straight, dating all the way back to Assen.
Further down the order, Sara Sanchez (Hadden Racing Team) converted a P10 grid start into an eighth-place finish to lead the third group. Muklada Sarapuech (Yamaha AD78 FIMLA by EEST NJT Racing) showed early promise running in P7 before fading over the second half of the contest to take P9. French competitor Emily Bondi (FT Racing Academy) rounded out the top ten, securing her third consecutive top-ten finish across the last three rounds.
