The seventh and penultimate round of the FIM Sportbike World Championship (WorldSPB) took place in Italy between Friday 25 and Sunday 27 September, with Kawasaki taking the Manufacturers’ Title after the first race of the scheduled two races of the weekend on Saturday.

Xavi Artigas (MTM Kawasaki) rode his Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R 636 to victory in Race One, and moved even closer to championship leader David Salvador (Team ProDina Kawasaki XCI) in the rider standings after finishing second in Race Two on the Sunday.

Such is the competitiveness of this new class, that Kawasaki is focusing on in order to develop younger riders into the WorldSBK/WorldSSP riders in the future, that the final points scorer in 15th place in the first race was just 5.118 seconds from the race winner, Artigas.

In terms of overall significance, the most important single consequence of Race One for all the Kawasaki teams and riders in the paddock was that Kawasaki won the 2026 Manufacturers’ Championship with three races to spare. Kawasaki had an unassailable 282 point lead in the Manufacturer’s standings meaning that the celebrations could begin.

In the Riders’ Championship following the conclusion of the Cremona event, the gap between leader Salvador and Artigas was only 12 points - 224 to 212 while in the Teams’ Championship, with the final round to go, the current advantage of 85 points for the Team Prodina Kawasaki XCI squad over the MTM Kawasaki squad means that neither has quite won that title yet, but one of them will be guaranteed to be crowned champions at the final round in Jerez. All other teams are now too far behind, no matter what the results will be in Spain.

With the tempting prospect of Kawasaki making a “clean sweep” of Manufacturer, Team and Rider awards in this first season of the new WorldSPB Championship, the Team Green program will get a further boost in its quest to help young riders achieve their full potential with Kawasaki, as Managing Director of Kawasaki Motors Europe, Shigemi Tanaka commented: 

“Kawasaki is understandably proud to achieve the manufacturers title in the inaugural World Sportbike Championship. Our investment in this feeder class within the WorldSBK paddock goes back to the very start of the WSS300 series in which our teams and riders took five titles and collectively Kawasaki won the manufacturer title seven times. 

At the outset of this new Championship, we knew we could not rest on our laurels, so we moved from the Ninja 400 to the Ninja ZX-6R 636 as machine of choice. That decision has been vindicated by the many fastest laps, pole positions and race wins by Kawasaki mounted riders across the season.

Naturally, our back office and on-track technical support service has moved on too and we are energised by the fact that so much information can be shared across teams and riders so that all our Ninja mounted competitors benefit equally. Their commitment has been total, and this title is as much theirs as ours.

We are not just proud of the 2026 Sportbike Manufacturer title but that, as a result of this new class, we will now see David Salvador elevated to the Puccetti Kawasaki World Supersport team in 2027 which is the perfect illustration of our Team Green rider growth philosophy.”