How Ducati’s 2026 WorldSBK race bike differs from 2025

WorldSBK is set for a major shake-up in 2026, with Toprak Razgatlioglu leaving, JOnathan Rea retiring, and Alvaro Bautista dropping from the factory Ducati team to the Barni squad; but riders are not the only thing to change next year, as Ducati will introduce the 2026 version of its Panigale V4 R.

The current generation of the Panigale V4 R was introduced in 2019. It immediately made a mark in World Superbike as it won the opening 11 races of the season. 

We know by now how the 2019 season played out for Ducati and Alvaro Bautista, but by 2022 the V4 was World Champion with the Spaniard, who repeated the feat in 2023.

The new bike, then, will have a high standard to live up to, and it does make some technical changes over the current V4 R.

The most obvious changes – the ones we can see – are, in some cases, components that the V4 R will share with the 2025 Panigale V4. These are the new, larger (by 20mm) front wings and the double-sided swingarm.

The new front wings, Ducati says, translate to a 25 per cent increase in aerodynamic load compared to the current bike, “which translates,” it says, “into an increase in downforce of 4.8kg at 270km/h [168mph] and 6kg at 300km/h [186mph]”.

At the bottom of the fairing are downwash ducts (not found on the 2025 V4) like those found in MotoGP since Ducati introduced them in 2021. Ducati calls them ‘corner sidepods’, and they will introduce ground effect aerodynamics to World Superbike for the first time. 

The swingarm comes in conjunction with a new front frame that reduces lateral stiffness by 40 per cent compared to the current bike. Both were designed with racing use in mind, and Ducati says that “the new frame and swingarm allow the bike to close trajectories [lines] better, also improving traction when exiting corners and the rider's feeling during acceleration.”

On the engine side, the new bike takes the same base design as the previous one but adds 5.1 per cent lighter pistons and a new crankshaft that Ducati says provides “increase inertia”.

We’ve heard Nicolo Bulega speak often in 2025 about the poor performance, as he sees it, of the 2025 bike in small, low-speed corners because the engine is too reactive. This crankshaft modification should help in this regard, in combination with the increased traction provided by the double-sided swingarm.

We’ve already seen an early version of the race-spec 2026 V4 R out on-track this year, in the hands of Michele Pirro at Misano and then with both Nicolo Bulega and Alvaro Bautista at Aragon at the end of August. The expectation, naturally, is that the new bike will be an improvement over the current one, but we will only be able to gauge that improvement, and what that means for Ducati’s WorldSBK rivals, once winter testing for the 2026 season gets underway following the conclusion of the 2025 season.