Bulega-Ducati dominance leaves WorldSBK with “no excitement” says Jonathan Rea

After eight rounds of the 2026 WorldSBK season, only Nicolo Bulega and Iker Lecuona of the factory Ducati team remain in championship contention, and only those two have won races this year, something which leaves the series without “excitement” according to Jonathan Rea.

The split between Bulega and Lecuona for victories this year is 23-1 in the Italian’s favour. Some of those 23 race wins have been won in tight scenarios, with only tenths-of-a-second separating him from Lecuona for much of several races, and the Superpole Race at Aragon stands out as one where Bulega was really pushed.

Lecuona’s win came in Race 1 at Donington as he beat Bulega straight-up in a head-to-head battle that lasted the full 23-lap distance.

So, it’s not that WorldSBK is incapable of providing entertaining races in 2026, but the reality is that it is only one of two riders that can win races this season.

Yari Montella, for example, has finished on the podium in each of the last seven races, finishing third on each occasion apart from the Superpole Race at Donington when Lecuona crashed and he inherited a top-two finish as a result.

But Montella cannot even bring himself to consider winning at the moment; instead, his target is simply to have one race before the end of the year where he stays with the two leaders from start to finish.

The Italian, of course, is another Ducati rider. The first non-Ducati rider in the championship is Alex Lowes in fourth, who hasn’t been on the podium since the opening round at Phillip Island.

Miguel Oliveira is the non-Ducati rider with the most recent podium finish, that coming in Race 1 at Balaton Park over two months ago.

So, not only has Ducati as a manufacturer had a monopoly on race wins this year in WorldSBK, that monopoly has been confined to its factory team, while it has also had a four-and-a-half-round podium lockout.

It means that not only do you need a Ducati to win races, you need a Ducati to be even remotely competitive. So, even when you add in the surprise win for Lecuona at Donington, the overall picture of the competition in WorldSBK is hardly changed because Lecuona has had the equipment to win all season, he just needed the right moment to take advantage of it.

But for other manufacturers, the gap is never closing, even with Ducati 0.5kg/h under the minimum fuel flow limit allowed in the regulations.

For the fan watching on TV, this lack of competition leads to remarkable predictability, which is the primary obstructor of sporting excitement, something Jonathan Rea thinks WorldSBK is deeply lacking at present.

“There’s so many opinions, and mine is irrelevant,” said six-time WorldSBK champion Rea on Friday at the UK WorldSBK.

“But the facts are that the championship right now has [...] no excitement. Superbike should be exciting. 

“That’s [lack of excitement] not the fault of anybody. 

“I mean, if you have to make any conclusions, the conclusion is: chapeau Ducati. They’ve made an incredible bike and they have especially one rider who’s riding incredible, and you can’t take anything away from him. 

“But it’s very easy to see that the bike now is the reference by far and it’s sometimes hard for other riders or manufacturers – it’s not easy. 

“For me it’s easy to say because I spend my weekends on the sofa watching these guys and it doesn’t have the same battle like Toprak [Razgatlioglu] and Alvaro [Bautista], Toprak and Bulega, me and Toprak and Redding, or Chaz [Davies] and me, or with Aprilia. 

“Now, Ducati have done such a good job. Is it the responsibility of the championship to try to balance to make it, let’s say, more production bike, more of a production series, and fair for all the different types of production bikes? 

“Or is it the responsibility of the other manufacturers to actually step up? 

“But, let’s say, the sportbike market is tough, and when you’re a mass production manufacturer you can’t just magically build a ‘super-super-superbike’. 

“For sure, we need more excitement, but I’m not trying to undermine what the guys at the front are doing because it’s incredible: every year it’s getting faster. This is a nice thing, but the show is lacking something.”

Rea was keen to emphasise his respect for the job of Ducati and Bulega in 2026, but added that the other manufacturers “need hope” to continue wanting to compete in similar comments to those made by Alex Lowes at Donington.

“In one of the races I did, I said that he [Bulega] could go unbeaten this season, 100 per cent,” Rea said, a day before Bulega lost for the first time in 2026.

“His level is so high, his bike is the best bike, so without mistakes he’s that guy, like James Stewart in motocross when he had the unbeaten season in the US [Stewart won all 24 races in the premier 450cc class of the 2008 AMA Pro Motocross Championship]. That’s the level that he’s riding, so he’s incredible, what he’s doing. 

“But it’s up to everybody else to catch up. 

“It’s a headache to bring this excitement back or to give hope to, let’s say, Bimota, who are spending hundreds-of-thousands, or Honda, or Yamaha, or BMW – to give them hope.

“They need hope to want to keep fighting.”