With Toprak Razgatlioglu’s departure to MotoGP, Nicolò Bulega was considered the leading favourite to win the Superbike title. Thanks to his first two seasons in the category, marked by 20 victories that allowed him to become runner-up in the world championship in both 2024 and 2025.
Records spanning two seasons
Few, however, could have imagined such an explosive 2026, thanks to which Bulega has already broken some historic records: in 2019 Alvaro Bautista won the first 11 races of the season, while this year Bulega has taken the first 21 races, scoring a hat-trick in Australia, Portugal, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Aragon and Misano.
This streak, combined with victory in the final 4 races of 2025, allowed him to smash the record set by Toprak Razgatlioglu, who on two different occasions had strung together 13 consecutive wins in the Superbike World Championship. Bulega in fact reached 25 consecutive wins and was stopped only in Race 1 at Donington.
Not satisfied, Bulega also improved the record for consecutive podiums in the Superbike World Championship: thanks to the 13 at the end of the 2025 season and the 36 this year, the Ducati rider reached 49, surpassing the 25 achieved in 2002 by Colin Edwards and in 2025 by Toprak Razgatlioglu.
Bulega’s brakes
This season, on his Ducati Panigale V4 R, Nicolò Bulega uses Brembo steel discs measuring 338.5 mm in diameter and 6.5 mm in thickness. The Ducati rider prefers finned discs over traditional ones because they help cool the system, thus preventing dangerous drops in performance in the closing stages of the race.
The discs are acted on by Brembo monobloc aluminium calipers with four 34 mm diameter pistons. The calipers also feature cooling fins on the outer body, thanks to which the piston surface exposed to the air is 30 percent greater than on calipers without fins.
The Brembo calipers also feature an amplification system that generates additional force beyond that produced by the hydraulic pressure of the brake fluid on the pistons. With the same force applied by the rider, braking is therefore stronger than with non-amplified calipers.
In addition, the Brembo calipers feature an anti-drag system that, through a spring device, significantly reduces the phenomenon of residual torque. In other words, it prevents the pads from coming into contact with the disc when there is no pressure in the system, avoiding unwanted slowing.
Inside the calipers, Bulega always chooses High Mass pads, which, as the name suggests, have a greater mass than standard pads. These pads have a length of 90 mm and a weight of 155 grams, extremely small values that help reduce unsprung masses.
Completing Bulega’s braking system are the Brembo thumb brake master cylinder, with which he controls the rear brake both under braking and during acceleration through a control mounted on the handlebar, and HTC 64 brake fluid, offering the lowest available compressibility while also providing a high boiling point.
Season records
After analysing in detail all the brakes Bulega uses in the 2026 World Superbike Championship, clearly different from those he uses as a Ducati MotoGP test rider, let us look at the season records he achieved and the colleague from whom he took each record:
1 - Wins in a season: previous record holder Álvaro Bautista
Before this year, two riders had reached 20 wins in a championship: Toprak Razgatlioglu won 21 races in 2025, but the record belonged to Álvaro Bautista with 27 wins in 2023 on the Ducati Panigale V4 R equipped with a Brembo braking system. Nicolò Bulega, instead, won an impressive 32 races
2 - Podiums in a season: previous record holder Jonathan Rea
To win the World Championship, since the Superpole Race was introduced in 2019, increasing the number of races by 50 per cent, it has been necessary to achieve at least 25 podiums. However, there are also riders such as Bulega himself in 2025, who collected 32 without winning the title. In 2023, Toprak Razgatlioglu finished on the podium 33 times, but in 2019 Jonathan Rea managed it in 34 races. This year Bulega made it a clean sweep by finishing on the podium in all 36 races.
3 - Poles in a season: previous record holder Ben Spies
This year Bulega claimed every pole awarded in the first 9 rounds, improving on what Jonathan Rea achieved in 2021. Only 2 riders have secured at least 10 poles in a World Superbike season, both Americans: in 1991 Doug Polen started from pole in 10 of the 13 rounds that season, but in 2009 Ben Spies did it 11 times, helped in part by the 14-round calendar. Bulega, on the other hand, had to contend with the 12 rounds of this championship, but despite that he equalled Spies’ record by taking 11 poles.
4 - Points in a season: previous record holder Jonathan Rea
The first riders to surpass 500 points were Colin Edwards and Troy Bayliss in 2002, followed by Carlos Checa in 2011. Jonathan Rea, riding the Brembo-braked Kawasaki in 2019, was then the first to go beyond 600 points: he scored 663 that year, an untouchable record. But Bulega did significantly better, amassing an impressive 726 points.
5 - Laps led in a season: previous record holder Alvaro Bautista
Winning races is one thing, staying ahead of everyone from the start to the chequered flag is another: it requires an excellent qualifying session, a hesitation-free start and the speed to pull away immediately. It is no coincidence that there had been only 2 cases of riders finishing at the front for more than 300 laps in a season: 323 laps by Toprak Razgatlioglu in 2024 and 347 laps by Alvaro Bautista in 2023. But Bulega raised the bar even further by reaching 499.
6 - Fastest laps in a race in a season: previous record holder Alvaro Bautista
The second seasonal record Bulega broke was the one for fastest laps in races, having already collected 31. The only ones to elude him were Race 2 in Portugal, Race 1 at Most and the Superpole Race at Donington, as well as the two long races at Cremona, claimed by teammate Iker Lecuona and Sam Lowes. In the history of the Superbike World Championship, only two riders had exceeded 16 fastest laps in a single season: in 2023 Alvaro Bautista reached 23, while last year Toprak Razgatlioglu recorded 20.
In short, the only thing that managed to stop Nicolò Bulega’s run in 2026 was Brembo brakes.
Brakes he will find again, albeit with different specifications, in MotoGP in 2027.