Injuries cause uncertainty in title fight | Five WSBK talking points

What happens to a championship when it loses not only its main star, but its three biggest names all through injury, and all on the same weekend?

The WorldSBK French Round provided that rare scenario, allowing other riders to come to the fore.

Motorcycle racing bites

It’s hardly a revelation at this point that racing motorcycles comes with risks but that was especially apparent last weekend in France.

Toprak Razgatlioglu’s crash is the perfect example. The Turkish rider was walking to the title, Greg Haines even mentioning in commentary for Eurosport n FP1 that the BMW rider could win 28 races in succession if he kept his winning streak — which was 13-strong going into Magny-Cours — going until the end of the season.

Then he lost the front and punctured his lung on a wall that an idiot like your author here had barely even noticed before in 12 years of watching WSBK at Magny.

Then Nicolo Bulega injured his shoulder, Jonathan Rea had to have specialist treatment on a deep wound on his thumb, and Alvaro Bautista broke the eighth rib in his left rib cage. All comfortably within 48 hours.

For this, it was comfortably one of the weirdest weekends in recent WorldSBK history, but also one of the most fortunate, because clearly Razgatlioglu’s Friday crash could have required the adjective to be changed from “weird” to “tragic”.

But, even with Razgatlioglu getting, more or less, away with his crash, it still provided a pretty big contrast to previous weekends. From 13 consecutive wins, Razgatlioglu was in hospital and out of action for one mistake in a practice.

Is there a title fight?

It’s a tough question to answer because significant pieces of information which are central to that answer are currently missing.

We do not know, one day after the French Round was completed, whether Toprak Razgatlioglu will be able to race at Cremona. Razgatlioglu himself expects to be able to do so, and so does his manager, Kenan Sofuoglu. But it’s ultimately uncertain at this stage.

Should Razgatlioglu be able to race, we do not know what condition he will be in, in any case. Sofuoglu thinks Razgatlioglu should be back to his 100 per cent by Cremona in just under two weeks, but only time will tell.

All that, for now, is certain, is that the championship battle is much closer after Magny-Cours than it was entering Magny-Cours. Nicolo Bulega now trails Razgatlioglu by 55 points, rather than 92, which is significant beyond the simple mathematics of 55 points being 37 points fewer than 92, because it’s also within the 62-point maximum that a rider can score on one weekend by securing victory in all three races.

So, in answer to the question: perhaps.

Nicolo Bulega

Bulega didn’t make the most of his opportunity in France because he crashed on lap one of the first race, but on Sunday he was pretty much faultless; resisting the pressure from Alex Lowes in the Superpole Race, and dominating Race 2 despite the shoulder injury he picked up in his Saturday crash.

The Italian rookie won his first WorldSBK race back in Race 1 at Phillip Island, but hadn’t won again before his Superpole Race win over Lowes. The Race 2 dominance confirmed him as the best rider on the weekend, even if Danilo Petrucci out-scored him.

But was Bulega any better in France than he was in the rounds before it, when he didn’t win?

Possibly. But, realistically, not really.

He won, so there’s nothing bad to say about Bulega’s weekend, and he was the rider who came closest to ending Razgatioglu’s winning streak back at Portimao when he lost Race 2 by less than 0.1 seconds. But, as Bulega himself admitted on Thursday in France, that Portimao margin was unrepresentative because of the aerodynamic damage Razgatlioglu’s M1000 RR had suffered when passing Alex Lowes.

In France, Razgatlioglu was out of action in the races, so it’s impossible to tell how Bulega would have compared to the championship leader. However, we can say that Razgatlioglu was comfortably the fastest rider before his weekend-ending crash, the BMW rider finishing 0.353 seconds clear of Garrett Gerloff in FP1, and 0.689 seconds faster than Bulega, who was fourth-fastest in Friday morning.

Clearly Bulega got better through the weekend, because he ended Race 2 4.300 seconds clear of Gerloff, and 7.521 seconds ahead of Michael van der Mark (who was third-fastest in FP1). But, ultimately, it’s impossible to say if that improvement would have had him challenging Razgatlioglu in the dry.

If we look at Race 2 itself, it’s hard to see much difference between it and other races for Bulega. The Italian has finished second on 11 occasions in 2024, and on 10 of those occasions the winning rider was Razgatlioglu.

So, it’s fair to say that Bulega has been the second-best rider to Razgatlioglu this year; a step ahead, generally speaking, of the likes of Alvaro Bautista, Danilo Petrucci, and Alex Lowes.

Bautista, of course, was missing in Race 2 after breaking a rib in the Superpole Race, but Bulega finished the final race of the weekend 2.5 seconds ahead of Petrucci, while Lowes’ race was ruined with a technical glitch on lap one, from which he recovered to fourth.

In that way, it’s possible to say that, in Magny-Cours, Bulega was more or less where he had been up to that point in 2024: a few seconds clear of Petrucci and Lowes, and with a better execution of his weekend than Bautista.

The missing piece is obviously Razgatlioglu, but if Bulega was more or less in the same position in Race 2 compared to the likes of Petrucci as in previous rounds, would he have been beating the #54? Perhaps not. A fit Razgatlioglu you probably put two-to-five seconds ahead of Bulega, which is more or less where he's been for most of this year.

There’s nothing wrong with that for the rookie Bulega, and it’s far from impossible that Razgatlioglu goes to Cremona fit and still gets beaten by the #11. But taking out the championship’s benchmark from a round means that the results are impossible to validate against the rest of the season.

Rising tides

Michael van der Mark finally returned to the top step after almost three years without a WorldSBK win in Race 1 last Saturday. It was a wet race, but van der Mark was also competitive in FP2, finishing fastest.

At the time, van der Mark’s win extended BMW’s winning run to 14 races. Toprak Razgatlioglu had won 13 of them, but van der Mark’s win, albeit in the wet, affirmed that the Bavarian factory’s success this year has not been solely down to its signing of the 2021 World Champion.

Further proving that were the Bonovo Action BMW riders, Scott Redding and Garrett Gerloff.

Redding scored a fourth place despite a crash in the wet Race 1, then was fifth in the Superpole Race, while Gerloff took a podium in Race 2.

On the whole, despite Razgatlioglu’s absence from the starting grid in all three races, it was perhaps BMW’s most promising round of the season. They won only one race, but all of their riders were competitive, rather than only one.

Honda improving?

If it was a positive weekend for the BMW M1000 RR, it was similarly so for the Honda CBR100RR-R Fireblade.

It didn’t achieve the wins or podiums of the BMW, but both HRC factory riders, Xavi Vierge and Iker Lecuona, showed competitive speed throughout the weekend in Magny-Cours.

Vierge qualified sixth in Superpole, and they were both in the vast battle for third place in Race 2 that included most of the top 10.

Of course, two of the riders who you’d expect to be on the podium — Toprak Razgatlioglu and Alvaro Bautista — were missing, but Honda genuinely seemed to have made a step forward.

Perhaps most telling was that both Lecuona and Vierge were positive after the race, seemingly sure that genuine progress had been made, and that this upturn in performance was not only a result of odd track conditions in Magny-Cours, or the absence of some of the championship’s top riders.