Portimao: Nicolò Bulega’s record Superpole puts his teammate back in his place

Nicola Bulega wipes out Toprak Razgatlioglu’s outright record in a record-setting Superpole. The championship leader lit the fireworks for the second act of the World Championship in Portimão: the affront from his new teammate was all it took to unleash the Ducati rider’s talent.

In the three practice sessions, Bulega had worked with the race in mind, letting the others play with the soft tire. In qualifying, on equal rubber, Iker Lecuona tried to land the slap. The Spaniard’s 1:38.637 looked like a verdict, but there was still Bulegass to reckon with. On his second attempt (so with a tire already well cooked), he pulled a fantasmagorical 1:38.495 out of the hat: last year Toprak Razgatlioglu started in front with a 1:39.081. It seemed a limit that would be hard to chip away at, and instead it’s been trimmed by over half a second!

The front row is completed by a Yari Montella who is no longer a surprise, but a splendid reality of the Championship. So there are two factory Panigale V4 Rs and the Barni team’s satellite bike ahead of everyone. The new version, with the double-sided swingarm and other small improvements, has further widened the performance gap that already existed, and now risks becoming abysmal.

Until last October, Toprak Razgatlioglu served as a natural “balancing factor.” In his hands, the BMW flew, so there was a fight against Ducati. In this qualifying, Miguel Oliveira, the stand-in drafted from MotoGP, conceded six tenths, stopping at fourth fastest. Danilo Petrucci, ninth, was eight tenths down: the Umbrian will launch from the third row. Certainly, a winter of testing plagued by bad weather didn’t help BMW’s new riders. But the early signs aren’t very encouraging. The race doesn’t promise much better “because I’ve got great pace, I’m really happy with how it’s going,” Nicolò Bulega concluded. We had no doubt…

At 16:30 (Italian time) comes the first showdown of the Lusitanian weekend. Bulega starts from the summit of his 62 points, having taken full spoils in the Australian appetizer. Nicolò is on a seven-race winning streak, also counting the quartet with which he ended last season. Is anyone capable of beating him and injecting interest into this Superbike World Championship that risks being one-way traffic? Here, last year, Toprak Razgatlioglu swept the board, winning everything, always after last-meter duels with Nicolò himself. The Turk also holds the official track record: 1:39.441 set in the Superpole Race a year ago.