The long winter period may be in full swing but there is still time to look back at the 2023 WorldSBK Championship season as BSN brings you our rundown of the Top 10 WorldSBK Riders of the Year.

Up in fourth place is Jonathan Rea in his final season with Kawasaki

While the 2023 WorldSBK season wasn’t exactly a flourish on which to complete his final campaign with the Kawasaki Racing Team, Jonathan Rea put in his most dogged performance of his career en route to third overall.

After so long at the top in Rea’s hands, the Kawasaki ZX-10RR package really began to show its age in 2023, the flip-side of Provec’s strategy of maintaining many mechanicals that - while well-proven - are now around a decade old.

A tactic that helped it to keep evolving the ZX-10RR and maintain its advantage in the ensuing years, alas time has now caught up with the Kawasaki, leaving it with diminishing returns as it struggles to get more speed from it while rivals take strides into the future.

It’s an issue that led to two opposing outcomes for Rea himself. On the one hand, he struggled to keep up with key rivals Alvaro Bautista and Toprak Razgatlioglu, on the other he’s never looked so determined in trying to do so anyway.

Having been forced to adopt a more aggressive riding style in recent years to keep himself in the mix - something that he never looked entirely comfortable doing - this year Rea looked more at home riding on the edge, so it was a shame that the ZX-10RR struggled to keep up.

An iffy start to the season notwithstanding, Rea found his groove eventually and generally supplanted himself as ‘best of the rest’ behind Bautista and Razgatlioglu, his eventual third in the standings arguably a measure of the rider rather than bike’s capabilities.

Then again, Rea will be disappointed to be left so far adrift of Razgatlioglu especially, the Turk proving comfortably faster while also riding out of his skin on a Yamaha that isn’t too dissimilar to the Kawasaki in terms of age and configuration.

Eventually it became known that this would be Rea’s swansong WorldSBK season with Kawasaki, so it’s lucky he’d have the chance to give it a parting gift of at least one win, achieved in the wet at Most.

While it will be strange to see Rea riding something other than the ZX-10RR next year, few will deny that this is probably the right time to move on for himself as a racer…

BSN’s Top 10 WorldSBK Riders of 2023

5 - Danilo Petrucci

6 - Andrea Locatelli

7 - Michael Ruben Rinaldi

8 - Garrett Gerloff

9 - Dominique Aegerter

10 - Alex Lowes