Everything you need to know about WSBK dominator's MotoGP move
World Superbike championship leader Nicolo Bulega will officially move to MotoGP in 2027.
Bulega's long-anticipated move to the satellite Ducati team VR46 was announced on Wednesday. It will coincide with MotoGP's pivot to 850cc bikes and Pirelli rubber.
Here's what you should know about the 26-year-old's way here, and his prospects in MotoGP.
Bulega is ridiculously well-prepared
Though he's shone on occasion, Bulega's former World Superbike rival Toprak Razgatlioglu has found the going tough in his rookie MotoGP season this year - but Bulega himself should face none of the adaptation headaches that have plagued Razgatlioglu's campaign.
Bulega did race the current MotoGP Michelins as injury stand-in last year - and acquitted himself well - but got carte blanche to discard all of that knowledge and instead zero in on the incoming Pirellis.
Not only does he know Pirelli rubber very well from World Superbike (Pirelli is the current tyre supplier there, though it will be replaced by Michelin in an effective swap move next year), he has done extensive testing with Ducati's 850cc prototype - and Pirelli's in-progress MotoGP tyres - already.
Though he has just two grand prix starts in MotoGP to his name, there's an argument that he is currently the best-prepared of anyone for MotoGP's new era.
Bulega was a VR46 prodigy who fizzled out
A decade ago Bulega had arrived to the MotoGP paddock as the 2015 champion of the prestigious CEV Moto3 category, succeeding its 2014 champion Fabio Quartararo, who himself had succeeded 2013 champion... uhhh, Fabio Quartararo.
Arguably the crown jewel of Valentino Rossi's VR46 programme at that point - certainly more fancied than counterpart Pecco Bagnaia - Bulega lived up to the hype in his first year of Moto3. But then, not unlike Quartararo, he really struggled and lost his way.
There was a growth spurt that hindered him, but things were clearly not right behind the scenes, too, and they never got better when he switched from Moto3 to Moto2 and eventually left the VR46 family to ride for Gresini instead.
Increasingly a stranger to even the top 10 in the intermediate class, he was no longer in any kind of MotoGP conversations - short-term or long-term - when he left the paddock.
Bulega made World Superbikes his own
The rise in the WorldSBK surroundings was almost as sharp as the decline in his MotoGP prospects.
Bulega ran riot in main support series World Supersport, clinching the 2023 crown for Ducati in dominant fashion and doing enough to earn a promotion to Ducati's World Superbike factory team - where he right away showed himself to be a match for franchise rider Alvaro Bautista, and soon left Bautista behind.
Razgatlioglu's BMW heroics denied Bulega the crown as a rookie in 2024 and, in a much closer fight, as a sophomore in 2025. But with Ducati growing increasingly dominant and Razgatlioglu leaving the paddock, Bulega was such a heavy favourite coming into this year that the question in season previews wasn't whether he would be champion, but rather whether he would win all 36 races.
That hasn't happened - new team-mate Iker Lecuona has beaten him once, at Donington Park. But Bulega has won every other race of the season, and his coronation as 2026 champion is a matter of pure mathematics, currently pencilled in for the late-September round at Cremona.
He has led 401 laps, compared to 53 for the rest of the grid.
Morbidelli is going the other way
Given the success of its Lecuona hire (one win, 22 second-place finishes), Ducati was thought to favour other young, low-cost options to fill the WorldSBK seat Bulega is vacating.
In the end, though, Morbidelli is widely understood to have landed the seat as his MotoGP off-ramp.
His MotoGP career as a whole deserves it - three wins, eight podiums, title runner-up in 2020 - but you can certainly quibble about his recent form, both in terms of being a magnet for on-track incidents and in terms of struggling dreadfully for any kind of speed with the 2025-spec Ducati this year.
Of the MotoGP outcasts who will find refuge in WorldSBK next season, he has arguably performed the worst this year but will get the best gig.
And, depending on how much of a shake-up the switch to Michelins proves, it may be that only Lecuona will stand between Morbidelli and the world title.
