Ducati Coventry/JHP’s Marty Nutt ended Jonathan Railton’s winning streak at the third round of the Ducati TriOptions 848 Challenge at Snetterton with a hard earned victory in the opening race of the weekend, but the standings leader fought back in race two.

In the opening race Nutt had taken the lead and stormed ahead at the start and Railton was pushing hard to close the gap and maintain his winning form, but he was denied the win with Dennis Hobbs scoring his third consecutive podium finish in third.

Nutt was challenging to make it a repeat performance in race two but a determined Railton battled throughput the race to finally move ahead and return to the top step of the podium with the Ducati Coventry/JHP rider second to score his best results of the season.

Nutt said: “Overall, I’m really pleased with how the weekend’s gone and the only downside is that I haven’t been able to take any points off Jonathan. Saturday’s race went faultlessly and I couldn’t believe how good a start I made as that hasn’t happened for a while! As soon as I hit the front, I just concentrated on staying smooth and the gap to second continued to increase. Jonathan worked his way up to second by the end but it couldn’t have been a better start for me.

“I felt really confident for the second race but at around two thirds distance I started to suffer from arm pump, something that hasn’t happened to me for years, and I had to start riding defensively. I’d tried to pull away whilst I was leading but he stuck with me and there wasn’t much I could do to stop him coming by. Fair play to him though, he picked himself up after his earlier crash but it’s just a shame we both took 45 points from the weekend. I was really hoping to start making inroads into his lead but there are still ten races to go and we’re still right in there.”