Benat Fernandez says he has the same expectations for the 2026 World Sportbike season as he had in the 2025 WorldSSP300 championship: “I expect nothing”.

2025 was Fernandez’s first season in WorldSSP300, that coinciding with the final season of the 300 championship that arrived in 2017.

Despite his inexperience, he was able to make an immediate impact, taking pole position at the first round in Portugal, then winning Race 2 there. He went on to win the championship in a tense final race showdown at Jerez, taking the race win and title with a four-wide pass into the final corner.

Having approached the season with no expectations, the success he gained at the end of it is clearly something that is influencing Fernandez’s approach to the 2026 season when Supersport 300 will be replaced by the new World Sportbike category as the third tier of the World Superbike pyramid.

“I expect nothing, same as the beginning of this year – I didn’t expect [anything],” Fernandez told WorldSBK.com during the EICMA show in Milan.

“My goal is the same: try to do my best. With this, I’m very happy, if I do my best. 

“This means I can always push a bit more and improve all the races. This is the main goal, the main goal is to do my best and work a lot with the team.”

Fernandez added that he will first try the Kove 450RR he will race next year, and which was campaigned by Casey O’Gorman in the 2025 BSB Sportbike championship, in testing at the beginning of 2026.

“I never tried the bike,” Fernandez said. “I saw the races in BSB, but I don’t know how it will be. 

“For now, I have no feelings. 

“We expect to have the bike in the beginning of 2026, so I can test the bike and try to do some tests with the team, get some feelings before the races.”

World Championship title brings benefits

Fernandez will race with the same Team 109 squad that he took the Supersport 300 title with in 2025, but it will be an upgraded effort from the Irish team thanks to full factory backing from Kove which has allowed it to bring Phillip Tonn on as a second rider in 2026.

Team manager Paul Tobin says that the increase in support from China is a direct result of the team’s Supersport 300 title success this year.

“So, last year, in 2025, we were an independent team with some support from Kove,” Tobin told WorldSBK.com.

“They had given us some of the support from the factory bikes from the year before, but we were more or less independent from Kove, only some technical points. 

“Obviously, you win the World Championship, and the support from Kove for next season is we will be a full factory team, backed by them. 

“It’s a really good step for our team and also for the championship that now another factory team enters and for the Sportbike category it’s really exciting.”

Like Fernandez, Tobin is unsure of what to expect in the Sportbike class, or from the 450RR.

“It’s a new championship for everybody, so I suppose from the technical side the bike, the 450RR that we will use in next year’s championship, has already been developed a bit in BSB, so we have some data so we’re not starting from zero,” he said.

“But, still, there’s a lot of room to improve the bike. It’s a 450cc four-cylinder bike, there are some bigger capacity bikes, so the balancing rules for the FIM for sure will be challenging, and for our team also there will be a lot of work to get the bike to a good level. 

“But we are confident in our product from Kove, and we are confident in our riders’ ability also. 

“We’ll just keep working hard. A new project, you can have some bumps in the road, but sometimes it can go really smooth also, so let’s see.”