At the head of the class, Aruba. it factory Ducati were running a rather spectacular, one-off, livery, a silver finish paying tribute to Paul Smart and Bruno Spaggiari’ s Desmo 750 machines which took the first two places in 1972’ s Imola 200 Mile race. Jerez was another demonstration of the dominance of Aruba. it’ s 2026 Superbike World Champion, Nicolo Bulega. Fastest in qualifying, three wins from three starts but, by this stage of the season, any other result would have been a surprise. Just to make it clear how damned good he was this year, he won 32 races out of 36, the other 4 going to teammate Iker Lecuona so it was a total shutout by Aruba. it. Bulega’ s career total of 52 wins puts him level with Troy Bayliss, behind only Carl Fogarty( 59) and a long way behind Jonathan Rea( 107). That’ s all we’ re going to see from Bulega in WorldSBK for now, he leaves the series for MotoGP next year and whilst there’ s no expectation he’ ll show the same level of dominance there, it’ ll be interesting to see how quickly he adapts. Hopefully better than Toprak has.