Nicolo Bulega's upcoming two-race cameo in MotoGP, as replacement for the injured champion Marc Marquez at the factory Ducati team, is the kind of call-up MotoGP hasn't seen for years.
Which is not to say World Superbike regulars never come over to the grand prix racing paddock these days; they do. And it is not to say Bulega will be expected to fight for the podium or make a big impact on the competitive order; he won't.
But while replacement riders are literally an every-weekend fact of life in MotoGP, the newly 26-year-old Bulega is a fundamentally different kind of replacement rider. He is a rider with immediate-ish and, depending on how the cards shake out, realistic hopes of entering MotoGP.
That is not normal. MotoGP replacement riders these days tend to neatly fall into two categories: testers who have accepted that as their MotoGP role and are not angling for a full-time ride; and cameo riders there as some sort of reward or a bit of bike-filling.
Testers can be competitive. Dani Pedrosa and Pol Espargaro have been dynamite as KTM wildcards or stand-ins in recent years, but neither is targeting a full-time ride there. Most testers are very publicly not interested in being anything more. There's maybe one exception on the current grid - Augusto Fernandez at Yamaha - but even he seems to have accepted that his MotoGP future is that of a test rider.
And most of the other stand-ins or wildcards just don't have the pedigree, or have already been through the MotoGP experience and come out 'burned'. Iker Lecuona and Remy Gardner, called up by Honda and Yamaha not too long ago, are great riders in their own right but they have had their go in the premier class and no MotoGP team will be clamouring to get them back in.
In those lists, Bulega - who will coincidentally have Lecuona as his new Ducati WSBK team-mate next year - stands alone.
He has been 'burned' in the grand prix paddock, yes, but not in the premier class. Having exploded onto the scene in Moto3 (he succeeded Fabio Quartararo as CEV Moto3 champion in Spain, then was similarly excellent in his first season in the Moto3 world championship), Bulega found himself too tall too soon to do anything more on the lightweight bike and was anyway then a crushing disappointment in the intermediate class, eventually let go by the VR46 programme that he briefly was the jewel in the crown of.
But there are no MotoGP priors for him. And those years in the Moto3/Moto2 wilderness for him are less relevant now than the seasons of kicking butt in the World Superbike paddock in Ducati red. Toprak Razgatlioglu denied Bulega in World Superbikes in both of their title fights, but there is no denying Bulega has been an elite WSBK rider since not just his first race - his first test.
And he signed a Ducati deal that explicitly makes him a MotoGP test rider next year in addition to the WSBK campaign. And that all comes as Ducati will be developing a bike that will race Pirellis not Michelins in 2027, as MotoGP and WSBK swap tyre suppliers.
What Bulega will do on Michelins as Marquez's stand-in in the meantime is maybe not as relevant as how he'll do in testing next year. But it's not irrelevant.
The laptime target will be very nebulous. He's had just the one test on the bike at Jerez, so while I think he will at least have to beat what Ducati's 39-year-old tester Michele Pirro was doing as Marquez stand-in at Phillip Island and Sepang, Ducati will have a better idea of what's a reasonable expectation.
But it will be a trial by the particular MotoGP weekend format, and at the very least he will have to show a positive progression curve session to session - and show he is not overwhelmed by the challenge of the Desmosedici.
It's been a while since a MotoGP team has called up a stand-in who genuinely must be considered as a future option, so is in a way 'auditioning' in a race weekend. OK, Trackhouse did it for a test with Moto2's Manu Gonzalez this year, but for races you have to go back to Jake Dixon's races with Petronas Yamaha in 2021 or Johann Zarco's post-KTM rebound with LCR Honda in 2019.
It's a real rarity. And it's really exciting.
