SBK Portimao: Bulega a relentless hammer, the Sprint was no contest too

Compared to the previous day, only the choice of the rear tire changed. But even with the super-soft SCX, the verdict stayed the same: Nicolò Bulega and Ducati keep racking up wins and rivals. Same podium as Saturday, with the other Red of Iker Lecuona completing the triumph and Miguel Oliveira’s BMW. You can change the tire and the number of laps, but the result seems carved in stone.

Nicolò is on a nine-race winning streak: the five from this one-note start to the World Championship, plus the four at the end of last season. Rivals (and even fans...) were hoping Phillip Island’s dominance was an outlier, considering that on Victoria’s rollercoaster both the rider and the Panigale traditionally fly. But a month later, on a completely different track, it’s playing out exactly the same way. Since Australia, the only differences are that Iker Lecuona is getting more and more comfortable with the Panigale, making the red dominance even clearer. BMW is bringing former MotoGP rider Miguel Oliveira into the fight, but not even his aggressive start allowed the Portuguese to latch onto the runaway leader’s wheel. Where Toprak Razgatlioglu made the difference, Oliveira on the same BMW can’t even beat Lecuona, who has only done five races on the Ducati.

To grasp how one-dimensional this Superbike series has become, one stat is enough: for 32 consecutive races, victory has been decided among riders starting from the first or second grid slot. At Portimão, for nine races in a row, the winner has always launched from pole. The promoter wants a world championship rich in winners and plot twists, and for that they’ve written a rulebook that’s almost incomprehensible, even for engineers. But it doesn’t help at all.

Nicolò Bulega has the hat-trick served on a silver platter: Race 2 starts at 16:30 Italian time, again over 20 laps. The Ducati rider will set off from pole, and so far this weekend he has always led from the front. We’ll see if someone, maybe with a rocket start, manages to lead at least a few corners...