Danilo Petrucci's WorldSBK farewell: From his 2024 life-threatening injury to historic WorldSBK treble

At the end of the 2026 season, Petrucci will leave the WorldSBK series after a four-year tenure. He spent three years representing Barni Spark, a team headed by Marco Barnabò, who previously gave him a shot in the very early stages of his career before a switch to BMW for just one season in 2026.

A string of consistent results and three podiums placed him seventh in his debut season, before an accident in 2024 provided one of the best comeback stories in the sport. A training motocross accident almost altered the course of his life, with the inevitable surgery leaving him lying in a hospital bed after suffering fractures to his jaw and right collarbone.

"I was 15 metres up in the air, and the last thing I did was I just felt fear,” he admitted.

"I was so scared, but my brain goes off. The last thing I remember was ‘f**k’, and my brain just switched off.

"And when I woke up, I was still lying down in the dust, mad, sweating, blood, people were running in every corner.

"I hear the sound of the ambulance coming. Now I start to understand what’s going on. I didn’t feel my mouth anymore, just completely broken and trying to understand where I was, but in a moment, I recognised I had landed, and when I started to be conscious, I felt my legs.

"I immediately woke up, and when the ambulance came, I just jumped into the ambulance, and I think I was the happiness on the planet for one hour because I didn’t lose consciousness.

"It was like my brain recorded everything and that the fear of remaining without legs was so so much that my brain switched off and was last thing I remember.”

His openness about his near-death experience is a trait that makes Petrucci so admirable. In the face of one of his toughest battles, there was nothing to hide, and, as any other motorbike rider would, he found a way to come back from such adversity.

Naturally, it would take some time to get back up to speed, recording top-nine finishes at Misano and Donington. The performances were impressive, no doubt, but one of his best stretches of results followed at Most, Portimao and Magny-Cours, securing six podiums and eight top-5 finishes in nine races.

As the series headed to Cremona for its inaugural race meet, Petrucci went on to dominate and secure a historic treble. He was - and still is - the only rider to secure a treble of victories with a satellite team.

“It was one of the best weekends in my career! It’s something really special. A new track, a new venue, a lot of people… I think everyone in Italy deserves this kind of day today," the Terni rider shared with WorldSBK after the race.

Five months on from his accident, Petrucci’s journey back to competition - recovering from his injuries, training to regain his fitness and even returning to a normal life before being able to do his job again - can be looked back on as one of the standout moments of his unorthodox yet equally adventurous career.