Bautista started by sweeping Imola and stroking the record of victories

Álvaro Bautista (Aruba.it Racing-Ducati) took his seventeenth victory of the season on Saturday of the Superbike World Championship, where he is one away from the absolute record for wins at the same course, by winning the first of the races scheduled for this weekend at the Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari in Imola (Italy).

The current world champion signed an impressive victory at Imola ahead of the 2021 champion, the Turkish Toprak Razgatlioglu (Pata Yamaha Prometeon WorldSBK), who reached the 100th podium of his career by finishing second in 3.672 seconds; and Britain’s Jonathan Rea (Kawasaki Racing Team WorldSBK), third on 13,543.

gg.didomi.doWhenConsent(!window.didomiBypass, ‘c:twitterwi-wUmBnnKy’, function () {
var x = document.createElement(‘script’);
x.setAttribute(“type”,”text/javascript”);
x.setAttribute(“src”, “//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”);
x.setAttribute(“charset”, “utf-8”);
$(“.twitter-tweet”).closest( “span” ).append(x);
});

The race was a good battle between Bautista and Razgatlioglu, which ended long in favor of the former, who sealing his forty-ninth tournament victory and his seventeenth in 2023equaling the record set by Doug Polen in 1991 and Jonathan Rea in 2018 and 2019. With another victory, the Talavera native will mark a new single-campaign complete game record.

Second place gives Razgatlioglu his 100th Supebike World Championship podium and his 16th in a row, the sixth longest streak of all time. Rea reached his 252nd podium, while Toprak and Jonny shared the podium for the seventy-fifth time.

Álvaro Bautista has a chance this Sunday to become the driver with the most victories in the same campaign.