Danilo Petrucci: “I was riding alone like last year, but…”

Barni Spark Ducati’s Danilo Petrucci was able to recognise similarities between his Race 2 at the Italian WorldSBK of 2025 and his dominant performances of the 2024 edition.

Petrucci was only fourth in Race 2, but the solitude he found on circuit, far behind the riders on the podium – Nicolo Bulega, Toprak Razgatlioglu, and Alvaro Bautista – but also over four seconds clear of the battle for fifth, allowing him to find some resemblance with his Cremona experience of 2024.

“I can be happy, but on the other hand the first three riders [Bulega, Razgatlioglu, and Bautista] did another job – I was riding alone like last year, but I had three riders in front of me,” Petrucci joked to WorldSBK.com after Race 2 in Cremona.

While Petrucci’s home World Superbike round had started well, it took a negative turn in Superpole when he was unable to do more than one valid timed lap.

“The weekend started well on Friday, we were quite fast,” he said.

“The problems started in qualifying: at the end I did just one lap, in 15 minutes I did one lap because of traffic, yellow flags, and so on.

“But [Sunday] has been positive because I’ve been quite good to recover a lot of positions this morning in the Superpole Race. Then in Race 2 I had a good pace, sitting fourth.

“Good points for the championship; we recovered [some] points with Locatelli but we lost a lot of points with Bautista for the third place in the championship.”

Petrucci added that he was struggling with the rear tyre. Pirelli took the E0126 development tyre to Cremona, which was also used in Assen.

It features the same construction as the E0125 development tyre used in Portimao, but where that tyre had the SC0 compound, the E0126 uses the SCX compound.

Other tyres were included in the allocation from Pirelli, but the advantage in outright speed and durability of the tyres with the new construction has meant that at both Assen and Cremona the E0126 was the default choice for the races by almost all riders.

Petrucci acknowledged that the tyre has good potential but that he is unable to exploit it.

“We struggled a lot, sincerely, with the rear tyre from Pirelli, and I think in the next races we will have different tyres [that are] more suitable to me, so I can’t wait to go to Most.”

He added: “The fact is that this tyre has a great potential, we have been much faster compared to last year.

“But I can’t use that extra grip, especially I have a lot of problems on corner entry. The bike pushes so much on the front and I don’t have a good feeling compared to last year.

“I can be satisfied about my performance but we want to understand why the top-three guys were so fast.”