Miguel Oliveira bracing himself for Dutch WorldSBK after past BMW form

Miguel Oliveira scored a dream trio of podiums at the Portuguese WorldSBK in March, but three weeks on the Dutch Round offers different prospects.

2026 World Superbike rookie Oliveira has been the best BMW rider so far this year, beating his more experienced teammate Danilo Petrucci handily in Portimao. 

But last year’s Dutch Round was not a good one for BMW; Toprak Razgatlioglu won the wet Superpole Race, but finished off the podium in the dry in both long races – fourth in Race 1 and eighth in Race 2 – as a combination of a lack of performance and poor tyre wear resulted in standout results for the Turkish rider who was on the podium in every other European race last year with the exception of the Jerez Superpole Race when he crashed out after contact with Nicolo Bulega.

Look one year further back and you find a victory for BMW and Razgatlioglu at Assen in 2024, but he was also ninth in the Superpole Race that weekend, again owing to poor tyre wear in what was his third event as a BMW rider.

For Oliveira, the memories of Portimao remain strong, but BMW’s most recent Assen form has not evaded his mind when considering his potential for this weekend (17–19 April).

“As I was leaving Portimao, I knew it was going to be a special weekend and one to remember because of all the support,” Miguel Oliveira said, speaking to WorldSBK.com.

“We started off with third place in Race 1, already unlocking a new milestone for me in WorldSBK: my first podium.”

He added: “Trying to analyse the past years with BMW, it looks like it is a difficult track, but we’ll try to maximise our resources and strong points off the bike to be as close to the front as possible.

“It looks like some points are fast, flowing corners and I guess the turning wasn’t the best on those kinds of corners, and also the tyre wear was an issue here. 

“We have a slight adjustment to that this year, especially with the rear tyre, which I guess will play out in everyone’s favour, but we’ll need to work on it to suffer as little as possible.”

The tyre Oliveira has referred to is the new F0298 rear tyre from Pirelli which is an evolution of the SC0 tyre. The standard SC0 is also in the allocation this weekend, as are the SC1 and SCX compounds in their respective standard forms.