Before we bid a final farewell to the year that was 2023 and begin gazing ahead to the year that will be 2024, BSN  looks back at the 2023 British Superbike Championship to bring you our rundown of the Top 10 BSB Riders of the Year. 

And the winner is…

So there we have it, BSN awards Kyle Ryde BSB Rider of the Year accolade - and it’s a very deserving one at that.

Indeed, this was always priming to be a pivotal season for Ryde, his fourth in BSB, his third with the OMG Racing team and his second riding the Yamaha R1. 

With title-winning team-mate Bradley Ray’s exit promoting Ryde to ‘lead rider’ status in his wake, so too came the lofty responsibility of defending OMG Racing’s treasured title success. A hefty pressure on young shoulders, it’s therefore a credit to OMG Racing for sticking to its values and believing in Ryde instead of leveraging its ‘champion status’ to cherry-pick a high-profile outsider instead.

That said, status alone wouldn’t make him the right man for the job by default and while Ryde had shown plenty of talent over his three seasons in BSB, he remained a raw one with edges still to smoothen - both on track and in terms of confidence.

Nevertheless, despite the pressure - one that could have seen his campaign venture entirely the wrong way in 2023 - Ryde got his head down to make huge strides across the board, putting the effort in both on and off-track to find the gains he needed to live up to those tough KPIs.

A lull in form mid-way through the season aside, Ryde otherwise sustained a front-running presence throughout the season and even conquered some of his more ‘bogey’ circuits on the way too.

His reward was 13 trips to the podium, six of which took him to the top, a healthy haul that kept him right in the title hunt until the final stages of the season.

While the superior ‘big match’ experience of Tommy Bridewell and Glenn Irwin - plus, the evident gulf in performance between his ageing Yamaha and the new Ducati - would ultimately represent the difference come the end of the season, this was the year Ryde kicked his ‘big match preparations’ up a gear.

As such, by finishing the 2023 BSB season as a more confident, focused and rounded rider than the one that started it, it certainly bodes well for Ryde next season when he gets his hands on a factory-spec Yamaha R1 for 2024…

BSN’s Top 10 BSB Rider of 2023

2 - Tommy Bridewell 

3 - Glenn Irwin

4 - Leon Haslam

5 - Ryan Vickers

6 - Lee Jackson

7 - Jason O’Halloran

8 - Charlie Nesbitt

9 - Josh Brookes

10 - Danny Kent