While MotoGP waits to begin its marathon 2025 season, its production bike counterpart World Superbike has got underway already - with a customary February opener at the iconic Phillip Island venue.
Last year, an enthralling season opener was quickly parlayed into a campaign of the new Toprak Razgatlioglu/BMW combination stomping on the opposition instead.
This time, Phillip Island was already a beatdown by itself - Nicolo Bulega winning three on the trot, his first-ever hat-trick treated as something bordering on a foregone conclusion even before a single lap was run in practice (due to his pace in the pre-event test at the venue).
Yet, coming out of a less-than-competitive round, you actually could read a promise of a closer season than what 2024 had served up - or a sign that WSBK has overcorrected with its rules.
The Ducati show playing in another theatre
Any talk of a good campaign, though, must first come with the exploration of an unavoidable reality - Ducati spent the Phillip Island round making the rest of the field an irrelevance in a way more befitting of MotoGP's recent years than anything from the corresponding spell in WSBK.
And it's not that Bulega scored a hat-trick in which he was never meaningfully threatened (unless you count Razgatlioglu nearly wiping him out), only ever ceding the lead during the mandatory mid-race pitstops in the two full-distance contests (a precautionary measure to keep the tyres in good shape carried over from last year, when it was introduced after a resurfacing). Riders scoring hat-tricks is no particular indication of a major trend in WSBK.
World Superbike standings after Phillip Island
1. Nicolo Bulega (Ducati) - 62
2. Alvaro Bautista (Ducati) - 36
3. Andrea Iannone (Go Eleven Ducati) - 35
4. Danilo Petrucci (Barni Ducati) - 31
5. Scott Redding (Bonovo Ducati) - 30
It's also not that, say, Alvaro Bautista went 11th to second in the final race of the weekend - that's just a very Bautista thing to do.
It's maybe not even the Ducati 1-2-3-4-5-6 that closed out the weekend, for out of those six Ducati riders the least-decorated one is probably Sam Lowes of Marc VDS, and that's still a rider who had stretches of being the genuine best in a category as brutal a Moto2.
The real bellwether was rookie Yari Montella, Danilo Petrucci's team-mate at Barni Ducati, being one tenth away from making it not a top-six but a top-seven lockout. Montella's a good rider with a clear affinity for Phillip Island, but it's that kind of result that tells you even the privateer Panigale V4 Rs are now officially too much for WSBK's less-performing manufacturers.
The series has done away with RPM-based performance-balancing this season, instead seeking to control things through limiting fuel flow. But, of course, that is rigidly-prescribed - so any amendments to what Ducati and its rivals are permitted depend on 'concession points', which are assessed in two-round increments.
Given Ducati has won 14 times out of the last 20 races here, most rounds probably won't look like this.
Razgatlioglu and BMW are lessened - and irritated
It was by no stretch of the imagination a good round for BMW as a whole or its reigning dominant champion Razgatlioglu in particular. He had a costly off - the one that nearly wiped out Bulega and/or Andrea Iannone - in the short superpole race, then had a mechanical failure that now puts him 42 points in the hole relative to Bulega coming out of the round.
BMW - now depleted in entries following its split with the satellite Bonovo squad - will no doubt point to how the round went to make the argument it's been treated too harshly by the rulemakers.
The manufacturer has debuted a new M1000RR with a new engine, but has been forced amid the switch to give up the modified 'superconcession' chassis Razgatlioglu had used to such devastating effect last year.
"We are slower," Razgatlioglu told media even after finishing second in the opening race. "I'm now riding at the limit the whole time, my bike is constantly slipping, I'm searching for grip and pushing as hard as I can. I have nothing left in the bag."
He also repeatedly described what he'd seen as "almost a Ducati cup" and said: "If Dorna wants to see fights, then I need my old bike back."
"I hope it doesn't continue like this," he told the championship's official site at the end of the round. "Because everyone's not enjoying like this. And if Superbike continues like this also in the future, I'm thinking of not racing here anymore."
The caveat is, nothing at Phillip Island can truly be taken as conclusive evidence for the rest of the season. Especially as Razgatlioglu's preparation was compromised by a broken finger in training in January and a heavy crash in the pre-event test (pictured above). Despite all that he actually scored more points than in the 2024 round - which he'd left 32 points off the championship lead.
Is team-mate Michael van der Mark a better barometer? Maybe, and he did take away just a paltry two points - but that came with his own weekend compromised by a fast crash in the opening race, before which he looked arguably more competitive than he had done for much of last year.
Phew: Redding's relevant again
Last year's WSBK campaign not only cemented Redding's multi-year BMW deal as a waste of everyone's time, but even tailed off enough to make you wonder whether he'd ever be good again.
Apparently the prescription was a simple one, for both him and the Bonovo team - a Ducati.
Redding missed out on a comeback podium - still not totally in tune with how the bike is on used tyres - but was top-five in every race, even after picking up a three-second penalty for a pitstop infringement in the final round.
"It's good for me to know now that I am capable of running in the top five here again - because after three difficult years I questioned myself. For sure. It's normal for every rider to have that question mark, if you still have it," Redding told the series' official site.
"I was a bit nervous. We made a big plan to have Ducati in this team [...] working hard to try to find the funding to even make this happen. There's a lot of pressure in my shoulders, race one I was shaking a bit in my boots, as we say, but then I got the rhythm."
Without attributing blame for the sour taste his BMW stint left in the end, it's clear motorcycle racing is just better with Redding like this - a rider who remains not only a nomadic race winner and champion but one of the more interesting characters around.
What about the 'have-nots'?
For all of BMW's angst, it's the other manufacturers who clearly should be more concerned about a 'Ducati cup'.
Last year a Kawasaki rider - Alex Lowes - led the championship coming out of Phillip Island, and Yamaha - in Andrea Locatelli's hands - showed itself to be very capable at the track, too.
But if BMW was simply lessened in this year's opener, the other manufacturers were at best afterthoughts.
It was, at least, a reasonable outing for Provec Racing, which after many years as Kawasaki's works team now represents another brand, Bimota, in WSBK - which means a new chassis, albeit still a Kawasaki engine. Alex Lowes, who hasn't totally gelled with that new chassis, looked well short of his usual superb Phillip Island self, but team-mate Axel Bassani has made a step forward, and for a new-bike debut it wasn't bad.
Yamaha, however, had a pretty rough round, starting with the injury absence of Jonathan Rea - who has been primed to finally take over as Yamaha's benchmark rider, as was intended upon his arrival last year.
After Rea's foot was crushed by his bike in a test crash, Locatelli - again, strong at Phillip Island last year - didn't make much of an impression and the satellite bikes couldn't show much of anything at all.
Rea's absence will stretch beyond Phillip Island. Surgery has ruled him out of the next round at Portimao, where Yamaha's new MotoGP tester Augusto Fernandez will be his stand-in (and he'll get to ride in the Portimao test before that).
As for Honda (which had Iker Lecuona injure himself for what feels like the 500th time during his stint with the team) and Kawasaki (now represented by a single Puccetti bike for Garrett Gerloff), they were by and large only on screen when involved in an incident.
The second tier is looking good
While it was all about one manufacturer in the main category, the summary of the World Supersport opener taking place in support goes as follows - an MV Agusta was on pole, multiple Ducatis led, but a Yamaha won the first race and a Triumph the second.
The mandatory mid-race pitstops were also in place here and injected a bit of unwelcome messiness, but with a rotating cast of characters out front - and the particularly welcome sight of Moto2 team-mate cast-offs Jaume Masia and Bo Bendsneyder clicking with the category right away - there's an early hint of a really good campaign playing out.
