BMW debacle at Donington Park: Instead of victories with Toprak, now a huge deficit

In 2024 and 2025, BMW celebrated victories in all three races at Donington with Toprak Razgatlioglu, setting the bar very high. To ensure they were as well prepared as possible for the final round before the almost eight-week summer break, following the protracted injuries to Miguel Oliveira and Danilo Petrucci, the BMW works team even took their riders out for testing on the circuit in central England at the end of June.

It was of little use: in the two free practice sessions on Friday, Petrucci and Oliveira were over a second off the pace and ended up in 17th and 20th places – in a field of 23.

On Saturday, they made significant progress in terms of lap times, but so did the competition. Still, Oliveira and Petrucci qualified in 12th and 13th places on the grid. They crossed the finish line in 11th and 15th place in the first race – a staggering 28.7 and 36.3 seconds behind winner Iker Lecuona of the Aruba Ducati factory team.

That’s what you’d expect from a World Championship.

Miguel Oliveira on tough competition

“These results do not reflect the effort put in by the team and myself,” Oliveira emphasised in a personal interview with SPEEDWEEK.com. “The harsh reality is that the race this year was 29 seconds faster than last year and I lost 28 seconds to the winner – that’s not good enough. Whatever we need to do, we’re not doing it at the moment. Not because we’re not trying, or because we lack experience or ability. But if it were easy, everyone would be an engineer or a rider in a world championship. It’s a tough job, and the opposition makes it even tougher. That’s fine, because that’s what you expect from a world championship.”

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Donington Park: Der Sonntag

FIM Superbike World Championship

12.07.2026 - 11:55

The weekend began with a false start

Before the weekend, everyone at BMW assumed that the test would at least give them a slight advantage at the start. After a disappointing Friday and Saturday, Oliveira sees things differently: “A test can be a starting point where you begin working on the set-up. But we were here and the bike wasn’t working. We made a few changes that we thought would take us in the right direction. We came into the race with different ideas, tested them and spent the whole of Friday chasing something that wasn’t there. So we’ve closed that chapter and now, from the experience of these two days, we know what not to do.”

The Portuguese rider concluded: “When I returned to Misano, I was still badly injured. We barely touched the bike because I knew I wouldn’t ride well that weekend. I wanted to build on that, and in the end the result wasn’t too bad. Now I’m fully fit again and doing everything I can, but we’re not quite there yet.”