This Week in Racing #5: A 25-Race Streak Ended by 0.165 Seconds — Same Bike, Same Tyres

Silverstone is done, and the calendar has a three-week hole in it. The next MotoGP round is Aragon, 28-30 August. Last time I worked through what Silverstone actually told us; this week there is no race running at all. If you think of that gap as dead air, you are wasting it. My pick for this week is something that happened back in July at Donington Park: the day a 25-race winning streak ended by 0.165 seconds. Watch it again from the start. Three weeks of summer break is enough to change how you read a race, and what you look at while nothing is running decides how sharply you see September.

Nicolo Bulega. Twenty-one straight wins from the start of the 2026 Superbike season, twenty-five in a row counting back into late 2025. Nobody could beat him. Then on 11 July, in Race 1 at Donington, his own Aruba.it Racing Ducati team-mate Iker Lecuona did — by 0.165 seconds over 23 laps. Ducati did not just fill the podium; it filled the top six: Lecuona, Bulega, Montella, Sam Lowes, Bridewell, Baldassarri. For Lecuona it was a first win in his 141st start. A rider who had never won in any World Championship class had waited 140 races for it — the second-longest wait ever, behind Locatelli's 154. And while we are counting, that same race ended Bulega's run of 24 consecutive pole-to-victory finishes. So it was not only the win streak that stopped. The state of affairs in which nobody could get past him, from qualifying to the final lap, is what actually ended.

So why did it stop? Having spent my life at these circuits, I look at the tyres first. Pirelli changed its standard rears for 2026: the extrasoft SCQ and the supersoft SCX. The race combination was an SC1 front with the SCX rear, while Bulega's pole lap ran the SCQ. And Race 1 at Donington was 28.661 seconds quicker than the same race a year earlier — divide by 23 laps and that is 1.246 seconds a lap. From here it is my own reading, but I believe those 1.246 seconds dissolved Bulega's weapon. His strength was the way he saved the tyre early and cashed it in late; in the pits, that team bets everything on what is left at the end. When nobody's tyre drops off, that savings account stops paying interest. From turn-in to exit, all 23 laps become a straight fight. And the decisive stretch was sector four — from the Melbourne hairpin through Goddards, where Lecuona took 0.093 seconds a lap. That part of Donington drops downhill into heavy braking, flicks through a slow change of direction and spits you onto the main straight out of the last hairpin. The man in front gets attacked on the brakes there every single lap. Lecuona absorbed that for 23 laps and shut the door at the end. A margin of 0.165 seconds is one good drive out of the final corner, nothing more — and equally, it is a gap you only reach by stacking that one good drive 23 times.

The record book is less romantic, mind you. Bulega won both races the following Sunday. After round eight at Donington he sits on 491 points, Lecuona 358, Montella 211, Alex Lowes 182 and Sam Lowes 177. Nothing about the title picture has changed. Superbike is on its own summer break now too — next up is Magny-Cours on 4-6 September — so the first thing to move in August is MotoGP at Aragon. At Aragon I will be watching for exactly the same thing: on a weekend when track temperature climbs and the tyre drop-off shrinks, who still rides to have something left at the end, and who empties the tank from lap one. What happened at Donington is a story about how a change of equipment rewrites the whole shape of a race, and that is not a Superbike-only phenomenon. Contract politics and rider-market manoeuvring are beyond me, but I can read what happens on track. What is worth remembering from this summer is not "the day the streak ended." It is that a man who had not won in 140 starts shut the door at the last corner on the same bike, on the same tyres, as the champion. If you want to see what happens the moment everyone gets the same tools, play Race 1 at Donington again from lap one. Three weeks is more than enough time to follow all 23 of them.