Superbike: Look at that crowd at Brands Hatch — BSB looks like the World Championship

The opening image looks like it was taken from the archive of the World Superbike’s golden days, when Brands Hatch drew over one hundred thousand spectators and was one of the most crowded sporting events in the United Kingdom. Instead, it’s from today: look how much audience the British Superbike draws!

Brands Hatch is a piece of Motorsport history, one of those fast circuits with breathtaking corners and an old-school layout that fans love. It’s also set in the hills of Kent, just 30 kilometers from central London, a megalopolis of nine million inhabitants. It’s here that a slice of the WorldSBK legend was born, thanks to the feats of riders who became icons like Troy Bayliss and James Toseland. Not by chance, they were both in the paddock this weekend greeting the fans.

Since the World Championship doesn’t come here anymore, Brands Hatch now sells out with the British Superbike, which on paper is a national championship but looks a lot like a World Championship. With the pros and cons of the moment: the new-version Ducati Panigale V4 is thrashing the competition here too. This was the fifth of eleven rounds, each featuring three races like the premier championship.

Here the near clean-sweeper is Kyle Ryde, 28. In 2024 he snatched the title from Tommy Bridewell by a single point at the last corner of the last race. Last year he did the double, and this year he’s storming toward a third title. He has won ten out of fifteen races, but thanks to the particular scoring system used in BSB the championship is still wide open. The winner gets 18 points, 16 for second, 14 for third, and so on. So the old lion Scott Redding, with four wins to his name, is just nineteen points off the top: Ryde 252, Redding 233. There are still five rounds to go, the last a classic in mid-October back at Brands Hatch. Attendance will be even more impressive.

The three Brands battles all ended in a sprint: two wins for Kyle Ryde, who was also awarded the title of “King of Brands Hatch,” and the last one was Scott Redding’s revenge. A couple of seconds behind the headliners was the Bimota ridden by a determined Max Cook, just 22 years old: his KB998 Rimini is run by the privateer FS-3 team, yet it finished very close to the Panigale V4Rs.

While Ducati’s opponents in the World Championship, Bimota aside, are taking embarrassing gaps, in BSB 2026 they still manage, albeit sporadically, to make their mark. Yamaha managed to break Ducati’s monopoly of wins with Bradley Ray at the previous Snetterton round. However, the technical supremacy of the Panigale V4 R is stirring debate across the Channel as well, and for next year the promoter (the racing giant MotorSport Vision) is studying appropriate measures to rebalance the situation.

Among the spectators at the fifth BSB round were the managers of Advocates Racing, who this season are competing in the World Championship with former British champion Tommy Bridewell. Even though the ownership is Australian, the headquarters are in the United Kingdom, in Corby. Over the weekend, Advocates Racing discussed a move to BSB 2027 with series director Stuart Higgs, in the center of the photo below. Could there be an empty slot on the WorldSBK grid?

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