SBK Donington, FP1: Ducati on top – BMW well behind despite testing

Donington Park is enjoying glorious summer weather with temperatures around 30 degrees Celsius. As the weather is set to remain this way throughout the weekend, the riders and teams are preparing for a battle in the heat, in which tyre durability will be a key factor. Grip on the English circuit is low anyway.

In the Honda works team, Jake Dixon is finally back following his cut-short comeback at Aragon at the end of May; he had suffered a serious injury to his left hand in February. Honda test rider Jonathan Rea is also in the mix at his home race on a wildcard. For BMW, Danilo Petrucci is back in action; the Italian broke his coccyx at Brüx (Most) in mid-May. This means all 22 regular riders will be on the grid in England.

Honda and BMW tested at Donington at the end of June, but there was little sign of this giving them an advantage. At the start of the first 45-minute Superbike practice session on Friday at 10.20 am – England is one hour behind CET – the air temperature was 27 degrees Celsius and the track temperature was 35 degrees.

World Championship leader Nicolo Bulega from the Ducati factory team set a notable fastest time of 1:25.960 min within the first eight minutes. By way of comparison: Toprak Razgatlioglu (BMW) has held the pole position record since 2024 with a time of 1:24.629, whilst the Turkish rider set the fastest race lap in the same year during the second main race with a time of 1:25.597.

After 12 minutes, Dixon crashed at Turn 8 – exactly the same distance he had covered in FP1 at Aragon before completely wrecking his Fireblade.

At the halfway stage, only the top 11 were within 1 second of each other; alongside the Ducati factory riders at the top of the timesheets, the Bimota duo of Alex Lowes and Axel Bassani also put in strong performances, as did Kawasaki’s lone rider Garrett Gerloff and various Ducati privateers.

Bulega improved to 1:25.870, putting him 0.085 seconds faster than Lecuona. Behind the regular winners, the field was thoroughly shaken up in the final five minutes, largely due to which riders were chasing times on fresh rear tyres and which were not.

Sam Lowes (Ducati) is third, 0.156 seconds behind Bulega, followed by Alex Lowes, the Ducati riders Lorenzo Baldassarri, Yari Montella and Alvaro Bautista, Gerloff and Rea in ninth place. The BMW works riders Petrucci and Oliveira lost over a second and finished 16th and 19th.