Aruba.it Ducati's Scott Redding came close to the second WorldSBK race win at Jerez but the overtaking ability and eventual ‘passive/aggressive’ defensive strategy adopted by championship leader Toprak Razgatlioglu was enough to limit him to fourth in Superpole, third in race one and then second - by just 0.113 seconds - in the final race.

“My own fault,” said Redding about not quite winning race two, by allowing Razgatlioglu a gap to exploit at a key time near the end. “Just went a little bit deep, really. It’s hard because when you’ve got a guy like that behind you, you know he’s going to try! So, the only thing I can do is try a little bit harder. We cannot stop more than him. Even though I know I was faster through there and I shouldn’t have really gone so hard, but I was sliding in the front and I thought, with the slip stream maybe he’s going to be there, and I just went a little bit deep, a little bit on the front.

“I wanted to come back, but I heard him. The Yamaha can just hold a tight line. We have to really ‘point-to-point’. So, if I go a little bit deep, he can take advantage of that and that’s exactly what he did. If I would have come, it would have just been big contact. So, I thought, ‘OK, maybe I can try again’. But I was just on the limit.”

Redding won two long races at Jerez last year, but not this season. “I haven’t had the pace all of this weekend. Qualifying was out of the blue. Every other session, I’ve been fifth, eighth, tenth. I haven’t felt good this weekend at all. But race one, just Sunday, I thought, get your race head on. Just relax, get in there, and build. That’s what I did. I just built in race one, built, built, built. So then for race two, I had more confidence. I went into that race thinking, ‘you can have a win here. You’ve got the pace’. I think that’s why I was able to be so fast in the beginning, because I believed in myself.”

Set-up was a moving target for a while for Redding and his crew too. “When you have such a tough weekend, and we changed the bike and we didn’t know, I came in and my warm-up was horrific. I did three laps. I couldn’t even put a lap together. I was off track here, off track there. I came in and I said, it’s terrible. There’s not one thing that I’m enjoying. I came in and I said, no. So then, for the race, it was different. I had to build on that. We kept the same setup, but I wasn’t enjoying the weekend and allowing myself to build confidence for race two let me relax a little bit on riding.

“I got a bit of a bad start. You get to move up to the front row unfortunately, because Alex couldn’t race. You don’t maximise it. I felt all right. There’s just a couple of places where they are a lot faster than me, and that’s three and four. Nothing that’s been like that since last year. When I got some clear track and I saw Jonathan struggling - because I stayed a lap behind Jonathan because I thought, he’s going to go in a minute and he’ll pull me to them. Uh-uh. I’m like, these guys must be backing up behind me and I don't want to get into any tussle right now. So, I made a move, got through. Same with Rinaldi. I passed him, and it was pointless for him to pass me back, really, but it is what it is. Lost a bit of time. I was able to get that back, but I wasn’t catching as fast as I felt. Then I kind of got there and thought, ‘don’t get too close. Just stay as you are’. I could see on his pit board they were giving him the same time. I thought, all right, it’s good. I just tried at the end. I thought, ‘right, the tyre has got to drop a little bit. Let’s see what we can do’. I made the pass, but I just couldn’t end up making it stick, basically.”

So not quite there, not quite enough of a dance partner to win with, although they came so very close. “I think that’s just because where I haven’t been on it all weekend, I didn’t have trust in the bike,” said Redding. “I was having a lot of front slides. It’s been that all weekend. I wasn’t sure where was the limit, so when I felt I was deep I was like, I’m going to have to let this one go a bit, and maybe I’ve got a gap I can cut back. If I could have cut back, he wouldn’t have beat me because I knew I had a good drive, but he was there. It’s like a game of chess sometimes and today I lost, basically.”