Portimao Practice 1: Who would have thought? Bimota nips at Ducati's heels

Superbike lands in Europe but starts again with a classic: the Ducatis shine with the injured Sam Lowes ahead of Nicolò Bulega right at the end. The Bimotas, however, are raring to go: they were fast in testing and the appetizer for the weekend also puts Alex Lowes and Axel Bassani back in the mix at the sharp end.

Sam Lowes had a high-speed crash at Phillip Island, injuring a wrist. He was doubtful for the mid-March tests right here at Phillip, but instead he recovered quickly and is already able to take on the World Championship leader. Bulega was just 4 thousandths off, while Bimota set the third time with twin brother Alex Lowes two tenths from the top. It will be interesting to see, in the late afternoon FP, whether for Bulega it’s just a matter of fine-tuning the setup or if the rivals can really shake up the weekend.

In the first session the best time was 1'40"287, far from Portimão’s official record set by Toprak Razgatlioglu last year in the Superpole Race: 1'39"441. With the Turk off to MotoGP, the Superbike cats are dancing now, Bulega included, who seems to be taking it fairly easy. Toprak is missed in the show but above all by BMW: for now Danilo Petrucci is ninth, Miguel Oliveira, racing at home, only eleventh. One FP1 is too little to draw conclusions, but it doesn’t look like a fairy-tale start, that’s for sure.

They say Phillip Island doesn’t tell you much, yet the first sessions in Portugal bring the exact same technical themes back to the fore: Ducati on top, Bimota in pursuit, and everyone else, for now, watching. We’ve already talked about BMW’s start; to find the best Yamaha you have to go down to Xavi Vierge in eighth, while Honda is missing in action. The legend Jonathan Rea restarts from an anonymous seventeenth place, on the same track where in 2008, with the same Honda, his legendary trajectory began. Still better than Somkiat Chantra on debut after the pre-season injury that made him miss Australia. We’ll see later if anything changes.

On the eve of the second WorldSBK round there were major moves in the paddock. Aruba.it, an Italian web giant, announced the acquisition of Feel Racing’s Superbike operations. We’re talking about the technical structure that managed the technical side of the Italian brand’s sporting effort in the production-derived championship. Aruba.it entered Superbike in 2015, taking on the role of Ducati’s factory team. Now it will have an even more direct line to the company, since the “filter” of Feel Racing is no more. This investment therefore confirms the national IT powerhouse’s intention to commit even more deeply to World Superbike. For its part, Feel Racing will continue to manage other Ducati Corse racing activities, for example the MotoGP test team.