Pramac Yamaha<\/a> squad.<\/p>\nBulega is the hot favourite for the 2026 World Superbike title, with the Italian also dovetailing his campaign with a prominent test role in MotoGP for Ducati.<\/p>\n
The Italian scored two points from two stand-in appearances in MotoGP in place of the injured Marc Marquez at the end of last season.<\/p>\n
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Bulega is expected to be on the MotoGP grid in 2027 within one of Ducati\u2019s teams, as he spearheads development of the 850cc bike on Pirelli rubber.<\/p>\n
Petrucci has backed both of his World Superbike colleagues to win races in MotoGP, while adding that Bulega deserves to be held in the same breath as Razgatlioglu.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, Nicolo has shown himself to be very, very strong this year,\u201d he told Moto.it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI already knew he was strong, but this year he’s really proven himself to be a phenomenon, in my opinion, on par with Toprak, who has already gone to MotoGP.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Nicolo will catch up with him soon; within a year, he’ll be there because he deserves it.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI have the utmost respect for both Bulega and Toprak; I think they can both win MotoGP races.\u201d<\/p>\n
Petrucci won his first MotoGP race with Ducati at the Italian Grand Prix in 2019, following that up in 2020 at the wet French Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
Riding a customer Ducati last season in World Superbikes, the veteran Italian will join BMW for the 2026 campaign.<\/p>\n
He will partner five-time MotoGP race winner Miguel Oliveira, who steps over from the Pramac Yamaha squad having lost his ride to Razgatlioglu.<\/p>\n
Subscribe to our MotoGP Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two-time MotoGP race winner Danilo Petrucci has labelled Nicolo Bulega as a \u201cphenomenon\u201d, and believes he is \u201con…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,6907,806,805,803,804,6909,85,23899],"class_list":{"0":"post-327824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-danilo-petrucci","11":"tag-motor","12":"tag-motor-sports","13":"tag-motosport","14":"tag-motosports","15":"tag-nicolo-bulega","16":"tag-sports","17":"tag-toprak-razgatlioglu"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}