Friday’s day of preparations for the MOTUL FIM Superbike World Championship race action to come saw a deadlock between Nicolo Bulega (Aruba.it Racing - Ducati) and Toprak Razgatlioglu (ROKiT BMW Motorrad WorldSBK Team). The Riders’ Championship frontrunners each topped one of the day’s two Free Practice timesheets, starting with Razgatlioglu in the morning, and Bulega in the afternoon. While in very fitting 2025 fashion the two hogged P1, Alvaro Bautista (Aruba.it Racing - Ducati) looked to be more comfortable atop his Ducati Panigale V4R, the Spaniard finishing in a more competitive P3 than what was seen at Most.

Toprak struck first in Misano’s Friday Free Practices, he flew around the track in FP1 with a time of 1’33.031s, 0.226s faster than his #11 rival. Razgatlioglu was the fastest rider through all of the track’s sectors apart from Sector 4, where the Italian phenom pipped the ‘El Turco’ by just 0.008s. Alvaro Bautista (Aruba.it Racing - Ducati) was competitive as well on the session, finishing with an FP1 time of 1’33.372s and riding well across sectors two and three.

On his splitting of Friday’s Free Practice P1’s with Bulega, and his predictions for tomorrow, Razgatlioglu said: “We started strong, the pace wasn’t bad, but also in FP2 when we put the second tyre it felt very strange, there was no grip. We have one more session to improve the bike, and if we can improve the grip, I think I can do much better. If we can improve my bike a little more then I can fight with Nicolo for the race win again, but also Alvaro can be in the fight too if he can improve his bike a bit more as well, he is normally very strong here. I think everyone is very excited for the race tomorrow, I will try to do my best as always.”

The afternoon’s FP2 saw the title titans lock horns and go lap for lap with each other as they each tried to dial in their setups for Saturday. As the pair shaved off fractions of a second with each hot lap, their battle inched further and further ahead of the rest of the pack. By the end of the 45-minute session, Bulega had emerged in P1 with Razgatlioglu behind, however the pair were more than seven tenths of a second ahead of the rest of the field.

On his Friday and what he would like to see change ahead of Saturday, Bulega said: “We made a little step from FP1 to FP2, my feeling with the bike improved a little but we need to improve more for the race. We need to find something more with a few areas of the bike that still don’t feel 100% how I’d like. We are in a good moment now but still not riding 100%. The track temperatures are the same for everyone, but it is much hotter, we need to adapt a bit, but we are working well so I think that tomorrow we will improve. It is very possible that we fight for the race tomorrow, but no one knows until race time, I could make a step tomorrow, or he could make a step tomorrow, we will see.”

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