We dug into Toprak Razgatlioglu's WorldSBK complaint to find out the truth

The World Superbike Championship kicked off the 2025 season of short circuit road racing last weekend, but between one manufacturer’s superiority and a unique race format the WorldSBK Australian Round left a fair bit to be desired.

Disparity derived discontent

WorldSBK’s philosophy of performance balancing clearly works in 2025 because the WorldSSP races in Australia last weekend were excellent and delivered two different winners on two different motorcycles.

Stefano Manzi won Race 1 on the brand new Yamaha R9, and Tom Booth-Amos took a career first WorldSSP win in Race 2 on a Triumph Street Triple 765. There were also Ducati Panigale V2s in the mix, a podium for MV Agusta thanks to Bo Bendsneyder (who also took pole position), and a top-five for Kawasaki’s ZX-6R 636 courtesy of Jeremy Alcoba.

But, at the moment, the Superbike class can’t claim the same level of parity.

Since the Ducati Panigale V4 R was introduced in 2019 it has been one of the most competitive motorcycles in WorldSBK, and its influence on the results has only increased in the past few years where the number of Panigales on the grid has increased to the current tally of eight with the two bikes of the factory team joined by six satellite bikes.

Since the 2022 season, the Panigale V4 R has won 61 of 111 races held (55 per cent). In comparison, BMW have won 19 races in that time, Kawasaki have won nine, and Yamaha have won 21.

So, since 2022, Ducati has won 12 more races than all of the other manufacturers combined (neither Honda nor Bimota – which only re-entered this year – have won at all since 2022).

27 of those Ducati wins, so almost half, were achieved by Alvaro Bautista in 2023 when he dominated the championship and ended the season 76 points clear of Toprak Razgatlioglu; who won all but two of the races Bautista didn’t win that year (Jonathan Rea and Michael Ruben Rinaldi each won one race), and who has taken 18 of the 19 race wins BMW has managed since 2022 (the other was taken by Michael van der Mark in Race 1 at the 2024 French Round), all of which came in 2024.

And yet, Ducati’s two consecutive lockouts of not only the podium but the top five positions on Sunday in Australia makes the brand’s supremacy feel more deeply entrenched than at almost any other point.

Sure, in 2023, Bautista was able to win with relative ease, but behind him was usually either Toprak Razgatlioglu or Jonathan Rea. In Australia this year, Nicolo Bulega won all three races, but in both the Superpole Race and Race 2 he could’ve fallen off or had a mechanical and Ducati still would’ve locked out the podium.

There are caveats. The Panigale V4 R is well-suited to Phillip Island’s long corners and emphasis on tyre life, and it therefore benefitted compared to the other bikes on the grid when the temperatures rose in the afternoon. Plus, Razgatlioglu finished second on Saturday, and would surely have at least been in the fight against the Ducatis on Sunday without his turn four mistake in the Superpole Race and the mechanical in Race 2.

About Bulega specifically, there is his own affinity with the Phillip Island circuit, which he calls his favourite and where he won as a rookie in 2024. The same was true of Bautista in 2019, but the Spaniard was less comfortable with the windy conditions that were presented to the riders last weekend.

2025 is the last year of this specification of the Panigale V4 R before a new model – which is available from this year as a production bike and which was raced in the Race of Champions at World Ducati Week last year – is introduced for the 2026 season.

Therefore, Ducati hasn’t improved its performance too much over the winter. Almost the only new thing from Ducati in testing this year was an exhaust that Bulega already used in the last races of 2024.

But what has improved for this year is the experience of Bulega, and of Go Eleven’s Andrea Iannone (who took two podium finishes last weekend, and could have been on the podium in Race 1 without an issue in the first stint). Plus, Danilo Petrucci is now a WorldSBK race winner, Sam Lowes is no longer a rookie, and Scott Redding has rejoined the Ducati stable – admittedly with a team that has no prior experience with the Panigale V4 R, but seemingly with a decent mix of humility, ambition, and motivation.

The other change, of course, is the change in the performance balancing rules for this year, which have done away with the established method of RPM cuts and moved to a system based on fuel flow. At the moment, though, all manufacturers have the same fuel flow limit, so the performance isn’t balanced at all, and won’t begin to be until the limits are changed after a few races.

Is WorldSBK in a crisis of Ducati domination? Phillip Island certainly suggests so, but, as the Ducati riders themselves pointed out, Phillip Island is a particular circuit with a character that is unlike almost any other, and therefore expecting the order that the Australian Round appeared to establish to be applicable in the upcoming circuits is potentially unrealistic and unnecessarily pessimistic.

On the other hand, apart from Scott Redding who mentioned Bimota and Yamaha as manufacturers who should improve in future races, the Ducati riders only really mentioned Razgatlioglu as a rider from outside Ducati who concerned them.

If Razgatlioglu can challenge the Ducatis in the coming races and be capable of beating them, WorldSBK should be thankful; but if he is the only rider not on a Ducati capable of winning this year (as he was on most occasions last year) then WorldSBK would continue to find itself relying on a unique talent such as that possessed by the reigning champion to bail it out of the kind of manufacturer monopoly MotoGP has found itself in in recent years.

Given the monopolistic manufacturer would be the same in both championships, and that both championships are promoted by the same company, the optics at least would be rather poor.

Pointless threats

There were no points for Toprak Razgatlioglu on Sunday in Australia. He was 12th in the Superpole Race after his run-on at turn four, and then DNF’d Race 2 due to a bike problem.

Combining that with the domination of Ducati, the sharp end of which Razgatlioglu also felt in 2022 and 2023 when he was at Yamaha, and the Turkish rider’s mood was not fantastic on Sunday evening at Phillip Island.

He labelled WorldSBK “almost like a Ducati Cup,” and suggested he could quit the series if Ducati’s domination wasn’t reigned in.

The reality of Ducati in WorldSBK is not a bad point for Razgatlioglu to raise in 2025. While in MotoGP, Ducati has achieved its position of supremacy thanks to superior engineering compared to it rivals who are all working to the same ruleset; in WorldSBK, Ducati races a bike with an engine derived from a MotoGP motor, while BMW’s M1000 RR and Yamaha’s MT-10, for example, have engines built primarily for the road, and which they share with sports tourers and naked bikes.

Sure, you can get the same V4 as the Panigale in a Multistrada now, but that’s also a track-focused Multistrada.

This is why performance balancing rules are there in WorldSBK, because the manufacturers aren’t all starting from the same point, and you don’t want to exclude manufacturers from the championship because they don’t see the value in building a 230bhp race bike with number plates and indicators.

At the moment, the balancing rules aren’t working especially well in World Superbike as previously discussed, but if Razgatlioglu wants to avoid Ducati domination he might be struggling to find somewhere to race.

Perhaps he’s happy to retire, having won two titles already and perhaps by the end of the year he will have three. But MotoGP is not a solution to his Ducati problem, neither is MotoAmerica, BSB, or CIV. Perhaps Asia Road Racing will be his destination – Honda won there last year with Yuki Kunii, and BMW the year before with Markus Reiterberger.

The Turkish star is also a fan of off-road and is fairly handy on a dirt bike, so maybe we’ll see him at Wild Willy’s next year, or the Erzbergrodeo.

In seriousness, it’s difficult to know exactly how, erm, seriously WorldSBK should take Razgatlioglu’s quit threat. He doesn’t have many alternative options for places to race, and it was clearly something he said out of frustration at his own poor results as much as at Ducati’s good ones.

But, when the biggest star in your production-based racing series is saying that one manufacturer is at an advantage to all of the others, and implying that the racing isn’t fair – again, it’s not the best look.

Robbery

The final thing that didn’t look especially great in Australia was indeed the racing. Sure, there were battles, but nothing like what we know Phillip Island is capable of producing.

Part of this was down to the Ducati superiority, but it was also down to the tyres and the mandatory pit stop.

WorldSBK announced in January that there would be mandatory pit stops in Phillip Island again this year, after they were introduced in 2024; then, though, they were decided on after testing, whereas this year the decision was made a month before the race, during the European winter tests.

After the test, Alex Lowes indicated that he wasn’t sure that the mandatory pit stops needed to be mandatory at all, saying that the tyres were lasting as well as they ever have at Phillip Island while he’s been racing there, which is since 2014.

But they remained in place, and the races were what they were. 10 laps of ‘this doesn’t really matter that much’ followed by 10 laps of the field being mostly quite spread out, at least at the front.

That’s not to say that there weren’t any good battles, because those for the final podium positions in all three races were quite entertaining, but they just never had the same kind of unpredictable excitement that Phillip Island normally generates, and that was kind of a shame.

(Plus, you have to deal with all the rubbish about penalties for exceeding the intervention time which creates the same annoyance as track limits penalties: that what you’re watching as a fan or a media idiot or a mechanic or a team boss isn’t actually the official reality on which the points will be allocated.)

Would Bulega have still won without pit stops? Probably, because he was just better than everyone else last weekend, but the other battles would have been more interesting than they were in reality.

In the future, it should be the priority of WorldSBK to have tyres at Phillip Island that can last the distance, because the pit stops just felt like they were getting in the way, rather than adding some kind of exhilarating chaos.