Nicolo Bulega's WorldSBK numbers put Marco Bezzecchi's MotoGP stats in the shade

Italy’s biggest sportsperson, four-time tennis grand slam champion Jannik Sinner, left a message after his historic Miami Open victory to two Italian racing stars of the moment, but not the country’s most formidable.

Beating Jiri Lehecka in the final at Miami last Sunday (29 March) made Sinner the first player in history to win tennis’ ‘Sunshine Double’ (the Indian Wells and Miami Masters 1000 tournaments) in the same year without dropping a set. 

In doing so, he extended his straight sets streak to 17 matches at Masters 1000 level, meaning 34 sets in succession. The previous record was set by Novak Djokovic at 24. It also meant Sinner won three consecutive Masters 1000 tournaments (he also won the Paris Masters late last year) without dropping a set, something that hadn’t been done before.

They are impressive numbers from Sinner, who was thought to be in crisis at the start of this season when he lost to Novak Djokovic in the semi-final of the Australian Open, and then to Jakub Mensik at the ATP 500 tournament in Doha in February.

The strong results in the spring hard court swing for Sinner have coincided with a winning surge among Italy’s motorsport talent. The Indian Wells final came on the same day as the Formula 1 Chinese Grand Prix, which saw Andrea Kimi Antonelli take his first grand prix victory for Mercedes. Sinner, who is an F1 ambassador, saved a line for Antonelli in his champion’s speech after defeating Daniil Medvedev.

Two weeks later, Antonelli won again, this time at Suzuka. A few hours after, Marco Bezzecchi took victory at the US MotoGP round at the Circuit of the Americas. A rain delay in Sinner’s Miami final meant it didn’t finish until long after the MotoGP race in Texas, and both Antonelli and Bezzecchi, this time, were referenced by Sinner in a message written on the lens of one of the broadcast cameras – a sort of tradition by now in tennis’ larger televised matches.

Both Bezzecchi’s and Antonelli’s wins were important, as they both took the lead in their respective championships. Bezzecchi now leads his Aprilia teammate Jorge Martin by four points at the top of the MotoGP standings, while Antonelli is nine points ahead of his Mercedes teammate George Russell.

Bezzecchi’s in particular saw him achieve some substantial feats. 

Firstly, his third lap led in Austin took him to 104 in succession in MotoGP, breaking Jorge Lorenzo’s record set in 2015 at 103.

By the end of the race, Bezzecchi’s 20th lap led put him on 121 consecutive laps led in MotoGP, and gave him a fifth consecutive victory. Only Valentino Rossi, Marc Marquez, Mick Doohan, Geoff Duke, John Surtees, Mike Hailwood, and Giacomo Agostini have achieved such a premier class winning streak in the past.

Impressive numbers, no doubt, but the numbers put up by one of the other Italians to win on Sunday are even more alarming, and the other Italian in question is not first-time Moto3 winner Guido Pini.

Nicolo Bulega won all three World Superbike races at Portimao the same day Pini and Bezzecchi won in the US, Antonelli won in Japan, and Sinner won in Miami.

It was Bulega’s second winning hattrick from two rounds to start the 2026 season, his third in WorldSBK. It was also his third in a row after he won all three races at Jerez last October.

Winning the last race at Estoril a couple of weeks before Jerez last year means Bulega’s win streak now stands at 10 races.

Such a number means Bulega can match Toprak Razgatlioglu’s record of 13 consecutive wins at the next round of the 2026 season at Assen on 17–19 April. Razgatlioglu managed 13 in a row twice, first in 2024 before he was injured at Magny-Cours and had to miss six races, and then again in 2025 while battling with Bulega for the title.

Razgatlioglu would ultimately win that 2025 crown, his third and second in succession. For two years in a row, Bulega was beaten by the Turkish rider, whose achievements earned him a move to MotoGP for this season.

Since Razgatlioglu left the championship, Bulega has not been beaten, and last year there was only one race Bulega finished in which he was classified lower than second. Every time he finished second, it was Razgatlioglu that beat him.

The race he didn’t finish second was the Superpole Race at Balaton Park when he chose intermediate tyres for a damp track, but the correct choice turned out to be slicks. Bulega finished 11th, his equal worst finish in WorldSBK, matching his result from Race 1 at Assen in 2024.

It means that Bulega has been first or second in every dry race he’s finished since the first race of last season, a run of 37 in succession. But it goes even further than that, because Bulega was first or second in the last six races of 2024, so his streak of dry weather top-twos stands at 43 races.

You have to go back to Race 2 at Aragon 2024 (16 rounds, or 48 races ago) for the last time Bulega finished lower than second in a dry race – he finished third. It’s the same amount of time back to find the last occasion on which Bulega was beaten by a rider other than 78-time WorldSBK race winner Razgatlioglu, because Race 2 in Aragon 2024 was won by Alvaro Bautista. It was also Bautista’s most recent victory, his 63rd in World Superbike. 

Bautista, of course, was Bulega’s teammate at the factory Ducati team in 2024 and 2025. Bulega joined the team in 2024 as the reigning Supersport champion, but joined it after a 2023 season in which Bautista had won 27 from 36 races, as well as the previous two titles in a row.

Memorably, the Italian won on debut at Phillip Island, becoming the first rider to do so since Bautista himself managed it, also at Phillip Island, in 2019.

Bautista is the second-most-victorious rider in WorldSBK history with his win tally of 63, but he didn’t beat Bulega once in 2025 and only 10 times in 2024 in races they both finished. Further, though, Bautista never out-qualified Bulega in their two years as teammates. Bautista was replaced by Iker Lecuona at the factory Ducati team for 2026 and Bulega has out-qualified Lecuona at both rounds so far this season, so the Italian has never been out-qualified by a teammate in WorldSBK in 26 rounds.

The other thing about Bulega’s form since the middle of 2024, since when he has been unbeaten in the dry by riders other than Razgatlioglu, is that you have to go even further back to find the last time he finished a race but didn’t classify on the podium. Not much further, admittedly, but one round further back to Cremona 2024’s Superpole Race, when he was fourth. That race was also the last dry one in which he was beaten by a rider other than Razgatlioglu who was riding a bike other than a Ducati – on that occasion it was Alex Lowes, riding a Kawasaki at the time.

That Superpole Race was now 52 races ago, or 17 rounds and one race. It was also 18 months ago. In that time there have been 49 dry races, 47 of which Bulega has finished, the two retirements being the bike problem in Assen Race 2 last year and when he taken out by Axel Bassani in the Misano Superpole Race last year.

Go back into the first half of Bulega’s rookie season and you start to see more races in which he missed the podium. Including the Cremona Superpole Race, there were 10 races in 2024 that didn’t feature Bulega in the top-three. 

That’s 11 (including the Hungary Superpole Race) races from 78, and given he’s DNF’d a whopping five times in his WorldSBK career (three of those being technical issues: Aragon Race 1 2024, Assen Superpole Race 2 2025, Assen Race 2 2025) it’s 11 from 73 finishes. That gets you to 62, or an 85 per cent podium rate when he finishes.

26 of those 62 podiums were race wins, which means he’s won 36 per cent of the races he’s finished in WorldSBK.

That’s impressive on its own, but even more so when in the context of the era his top class career started in, that of BMW-powered Razgatlioglu, who won 39 races on his own in the past two seasons.

Together, then, in the past two seasons, Bulega and Razgatlioglu won 59 races of the 72 run, or 82 per cent, and last year in particular it was 35 from 36. With only Bulega left, it’s perhaps no wonder, then, that he has started 2026 so strongly.

The implication of that no one has beaten Bulega in the dry since Race 2 at Aragon in 2024, and that no one other than Razgatlioglu has beaten Bulega riding a bike other than a Ducati since the Cremona 2024 Superpole Race, is that, of all the riders who have ridden a WorldSBK bike in the past 18 months, only one has been able to beat him in normal conditions. Of course, none of the riders on the current grid are that one rider.

A move to MotoGP seems to be the most likely end to Bulega’s dominance of WorldSBK, but given Toprak Razgatlioglu can hardly score a point on the still-baking V4 Yamaha M1 it feels more likely that MotoGP teams will pass on the Italian.

To butcher a phrase well-used by Ricky Carmichael: if you don’t like Nicolo Bulega winning WorldSBK races, you better get used to it.