Nicolo Bulega continued his march towards a potential first WorldSSP Championship title as he racked up his sixth victory of the season at Donington Park.

In the year that has seen Aruba.it Ducati take control of proceedings in both the WorldSBK and WorldSSP classes, Bulega followed up his team-mate Alvaro Bautista's victory in the 'big bike' race by enjoying a trouble-free run to victory in the intermediate ranks.

Leading from lights-to-flag, once Bulega had gotten the hole-shot into Reigate over the feuding Yari Montella and Stefano Manzi, he simply pulled clear to put more than a second between himself and opposition by the end of the opening lap.

Easing off in the closing stages, Bulega crossed the line +1.2s clear of Manzi in second place to stretch his lead over his countryman to 42 points.

While he didn't have the measure of Bulega, Manzi had his own edge over the rest of the pack by putting more than five seconds between himself and third place man Montella, who recovered from a difficult first few laps to catch and overhaul Federico Caricasulo to score his first podium of the year.

The fight for fifth came down to the wire, only to end in controversial circumstances, when Marcel Schroetter's lunge on Valentin Debise for the position instead just ran both wide at Goddards. Up to that stage Debise had produced a fine effort to haul himself up from outside the top ten to get into fifth, but was coming under pressure from the MV Agusta rider late on.

In the end, Debise was forced down to tenth within sight of the finish line, while Schroetter dropped to eighth as a result too.

In their place came Glenn van Straalen on the EAB Yamaha, with Adrian Huertas finishing as the top Kawasaki rider in sixth, with Raffaele de Rosa in seventh on the Orelac Ducati.

Tom Booth-Amos was another to benefit from the fracas, the leading Brit producing a fine performance to claw his way into contention from a low of 13th to cross the line ninth and take his best result of the year.

Elsewhere, Lucas Mahias dropped from fourth to 11th by the flag, with Jorge Navarro, Bahattin Sofuoglu, Tom Edwards and Niki Tuuli rounding out the points' paying positions.

Meanwhile, Rhys Irwin just missed out on scoring a point for the Astro JJR Suzuki team in 16th, though fellow wild-card Eugene McManus suffered a fiery exit on the Completely Motorbikes Triumph on lap one. Harry Truelove was another to retire, while Tarran Mackenzie failed to finish as well having run with Irwin for much of the race on the MIE Petronas Honda.

WorldSSP Donington Park | RACE 1 Results