Elf Marc VDS Racing Team rider Sam Lowes is confident he can crack Cremona in round 10 of this year’s WorldSBK Championship this weekend 

With just three rounds remaining in 2026, Lowes is eager to shine in Ducati’s crunch home round this weekend when the WorldSBK field return to the tight and challenging Cremona track located around 120m kilometres from Milan.

The track action will be underway on Friday morning with FP1 run over 45 minutes beginning at 1020am local time.

Lowes is relishing the challenge of tackling Cremona’s compact 3.7km layout, which became the seventh Italian venue to host a WorldSBK clash when it joined the calendar back in 2024.

The recent Magny-Cours round in France saw Lowes podium in Race 1 from the front row of the grid, which was the fourth round in 2026 that he has powered the Elf Marc VDS Racing Ducati Panigale V4R to a top three finish.

More podium success is the prime objective heading to Italy this weekend where he claimed strong top five results in both the Superpole Race and Race 2 last season.

Lowes heads into this weekend’s action sitting fifth in the standings on 198 points with eight podium finishes so far.

“We go to Cremona with high hopes of fighting for the top three”

“I feel that even though we scored a podium last time out in France that we didn’t show our full potential, so that is something I’m aiming to put right this weekend heading to Cremona. Cremona is quite a quirky track and very different to most tracks we race on but it’s something different and it has some cool parts. I always look forward to racing in Italy because the fans are so passionate. And hopefully we can be even stronger than last year where I qualified well and battle for the podium in the Superpole Race. We go there again with high hopes that we can fight for the top three as we look to put together a strong finish to the season.”