Nicolò Bulega between Valentino Rossi and… Max Biaggi
Having clinched the 2026 Superbike World Championship as the undisputed champion—even with two race weekends still remaining in the season—Nicolò Bulega is already looking forward to what the future holds: In the 2027 season, the rider from Reggio Emilia will return to the World Motorcycle Championship, competing in the premier class, MotoGP, riding one of the Ducatis provided by the VR46 team, the organization founded by Valentino Rossi.
Curiously, a comparison has emerged from the Ducati Superbike garage that is particularly surprising in light of his move to “The Doctor’s” team: Serafino Foti, team manager of the Ducati Aruba team, has in fact drawn a parallel between Bulega and one of Rossi’s greatest rivals of all time, the “Corsaro” Max Biaggi—a two-time Superbike champion who was also a leading figure in MotoGP.
“It’s quite something—they’re the only Italians to have won the Superbike world championship on Italian bikes, Aprilia and Ducati,” Foti told Radio Sportiva the day after Bulega’s triple second-place finish in Cremona, which secured him the world title. “Then Nicolò won Supersport and Superbike in just four years. We’re enjoying the moment—we’ve made a little piece of history.”
For Bulega, this will be his first full season in MotoGP: the rider from Reggio Emilia competed in two races in 2025—in Portugal and Valencia—replacing the injured Marc Márquez toward the end of the World Championship, which the Catalan ultimately won. Previously, between 2016 and 2021, he competed in three Moto3 championships (preceded by a wild-card race in 2015) and the same number of Moto2 World Championships, though he made the podium on only two occasions, both in 2016.
After moving up to production-based racing in 2022, Bulega returned to the spotlight first in Supersport, where he finished fourth in his debut season and won the championship in his second, and then in Superbike, where he finished second in the overall standings twice, behind Toprak Razgatlioglu, and dominated the 2026 season, leaving his rivals with only crumbs.
