The 2026 WorldSBK season is three rounds old, Nicolo Bulega has won every single race, and the man who won the title last year has already left for a different championship entirely. If you have been sleeping on World Superbike, you are missing the most lopsided dominant run the series has seen in years, a manufacturer on the podium for the first time since 1988, and a BMW squad quietly trying to pretend it is completely fine without the best rider it has ever had.
It is not fine. None of this is normal. It is brilliant. Here is how to watch WorldSBK in 2026 from anywhere.
Nicolo Bulega: six races, six wins, send help
Nicolo Bulega has started the 2026 WorldSBK season with six wins from six races. Six. Every race that has been run this year, Bulega has won it. Phillip Island, Portimao, twice each. He leads the championship by 56 points. The nearest rival is his own team-mate at Aruba.it Ducati.
The slightly terrifying context: if he wins all three races at Assen, he will have nine consecutive WorldSBK victories. That has only been done twice in the series’ history. If he then keeps going, he could match Toprak Razgatlioglu’s all-time record of 13 straight wins, set in both 2024 and 2025. Toprak, notably, is no longer in WorldSBK to defend that record. He has gone to MotoGP. We will come back to this.
Bulega is 24 years old, riding the Ducati Panigale V4R with complete authority, and is currently making WorldSBK look like a time trial. The rest of the grid is not standing still. But right now, the gap is real and everyone knows it.
There is a small historical footnote attached to the Assen round: Bulega had a disastrous Dutch weekend in 2025, which let Razgatlioglu back into the title fight. He will be aware of this. The circuit knows how to bite.
Toprak left. BMW is “absolutely fine.”
Toprak Razgatlioglu won WorldSBK in 2021 with Yamaha. Then he won it again in 2024 and 2025 with BMW, in the process becoming one of the most spectacular and popular riders the series has ever seen. Then, at the end of 2025, he announced he was leaving for MotoGP. On a Pramac Yamaha. That he is now scoring single points on rather than racing for wins.
BMW’s reaction to losing their triple champion was to publicly say they would “miss” him, which is the kind of understatement you say when there is literally nothing better to say. To fill the void, they signed Danilo Petrucci (MotoGP and Dakar veteran, genuinely fast on his day) and Miguel Oliveira (five-time MotoGP race winner, formidable talent). That is not a bad line-up. It is just not Toprak.
The nuance: Oliveira delivered in Portimao. Three podiums at his home round. Portugal had not had a WorldSBK podium in 36 years before that weekend. BMW has real machinery and real riders. They are not a disaster. They are simply a team that replaced the irreplaceable and are working out what that means in real time.
Bimota: their last podium before 2026 was in 1988
The most entertaining subplot of the 2026 season involves a manufacturer that almost nobody under the age of 40 associated with competitive WorldSBK racing until approximately February of this year.
Bimota, the Italian boutique motorcycle brand now backed by Kawasaki, returned to WorldSBK in 2026 with Axel Bassani and Alex Lowes. Their last podium in the series was in 1988, in the inaugural WorldSBK season. That is not a typo. Nineteen eighty-eight. The Berlin Wall was still standing. Bassani and Lowes were not yet born.
Bimota has now been on the podium multiple times in 2026. Bassani is third in the championship with 60 points. He has described his new crew chief relationship as “quite good” and his happiness as “reflected in his lap times,” which for a professional racing rider is essentially unbridled joy. The bimota by Kawasaki project arrived as a curiosity and is leaving the first two rounds as a genuine title conversation participant. Nobody saw this coming. It is wonderful.
Bimota: zero WorldSBK podiums between 1988 and 2026. Now third in the championship. The most unexpected comeback story in the paddock this year.
Ducati’s internal problem: Lecuona is also pretty quick
Iker Lecuona rides for the second Ducati squad, Aruba.it Racing, and is currently second in the championship behind his factory stable-mate Bulega. This means that Ducati’s biggest threat to Ducati is Ducati. If you find that confusing, so does everyone else, and Ducati’s management is quietly hoping nobody thinks about it too hard until at least halfway through the season.
Lecuona has been solid, consistent, and faster than a lot of people expected him to be. He is not at Bulega’s level right now. But 56 points is not an insurmountable deficit over 22 remaining rounds, and if Bulega has another Assen moment, the maths gets interesting quickly.
What to watch for: Assen, April 17-19
The Dutch Round at the legendary TT Circuit Assen is this weekend. Assen is one of the best WorldSBK venues on the calendar: fast, technical, with a crowd that genuinely understands motorcycle racing and makes noise accordingly. It is also the track where Bulega’s season fell apart last year.
The questions going into the weekend are straightforward. Can Bulega extend his perfect run, or does Assen bite again? Can Lecuona close the gap and turn this into an actual championship battle? Will Bimota confirm their podium pace on a circuit that suits a different style? And will BMW, riding at a track where they have historically been competitive, give us the first sign that the post-Toprak era can produce race wins?
There is no long gap between this and the next round. WorldSBK keeps moving. If you are not set up to watch yet, now is the time to sort it out before the weekend.
How to watch WorldSBK live in 2026, from anywhere
All championship standings correct as of Round 2, Portimao (April 2026). Next race: Dutch Round, TT Circuit Assen, April 17-19 2026.