Chaz Davies came close to taking his first WorldSBK race win on the V4R since Laguna Seca last year at Motorland in race two – as well as in race one, to be fair – but he could not capitalise on a final opportunity to pass the eventual winner Jonathan Rea. The last laps were not easy.

“Tough yes, and it was a huge opportunity,” confessed Davies. “To be honest I was hoping that Johnny in the later stages of the races yesterday dropped a lot and I was just hoping that he would be running into trouble. But he had a little bit more than me today.

"He was able to punch a lie bit harder out of most corners and there was nothing I could do to stay with him. I didn’t have any edge grip whatsoever, the tyre was completely done. That was all I had. But I am still pretty happy.”

Starts, and starting positions, have been a major downfall in Davies’ race winning ambitions, but he was still a close second. And he and his team made a set-up change that certainly did not help his starts, although it was required to handle the changes of wind direction. No individual integral gearbox ratio changes in WorldSBK, let us not forget.

“For sure the starts didn’t help,” said Davies. “We went with an overall longer ratio today for the higher winds that we got. We are already a little bit on the limit for the length of the ratio for the start. I feel like that just pushed us over the edge and it did not help me to make a good start. I got a little bit swamped by the pack. It was an opportunity to move forward from fifth on the grid (after the result of the Superpole race in the morning but actually I was no better off than what I was yesterday, starting off from ninth.”

Davies was markedly better in his race performance in these races than some others in 2020, although he has had some highlights. But he left ‘Aragon 1’ full of questions and thoughts.

“Quite honestly I am full of thoughts,” said Davies about his weekend, “I am thinking about what I can do better and what we can do better. I cannot be disappointed - I am happy - but I have got so many things in mind I just want to go back now and debrief with my team and try to improve.

I feel like we can win and we are missing a few details, at the moment, in order to let us - to bring us to the end of the race in good condition. I believe in many areas we have taken a step forward but in a couple of other areas we have lost something, so we need to look at the package - now we have one weekend of experience with it and try to improve for next weekend.”

Davies, asked directly if the good results here were mostly to do with his obviously special relationship with the Motorland Aragon circuit – seven wins makes it easily his best venue – or an overall bike improvement, said, “probably a bit of both but more I think the step forward with the bike.

"I have had good results at other tracks and even Jerez a few weeks ago was good but I feel like we were still missing something, kind of fundamental for me, and I feel like we have made some steps there.

"Without that the pace was extremely fast this weekend. Everybody is going very quickly here at Aragon and the lap time is a lot faster than what they have been in recent years. So without this improvement, even if the track is good for me, we would not be able to do that sort of pace - we have to have the improvements all the time. I am definitely more optimistic for the races coming up.”