SBK | Bautista: “I smelled the prey and I attacked”

The Portimao round represented, up to 5 laps from the end of Race 2, a turning point in Alvaro Bautista’s season: after a complicated first part of the championship, the reigning world champion managed to find good feelings on his Ducati. However, the dream of interrupting Toprak Razgatlioglu’s streak of consecutive victories vanished just 5 laps from the checkered flag.

Starting strong, the Aruba.it Racing – Ducati rider showed incredible pace that allowed him to threaten the lead and put salt on the tail of leader Razgatlioglu. But things didn’t go according to plan, because, just when the attack seemed imminent, the Spaniard slipped, putting an end to his pursuit and rejoining the track to finish 19th.

“Racing is also this, crashes can happen,” Bautista said at the end of Race 2, in which he was unable to stop Toprak’s domination. “When I got to him, on another occasion I would have waited a bit and then launched the attack. But in the conditions I am in now, as soon as I smelled the prey I wanted to attack immediately,” explained the two-time world champion, still hungry for victories.

Despite the crash that meant the victory slipped away, the reigning world champion doesn’t seem disheartened, but tries to look at the glass half full. “What matters is that I dictated the pace, even if it was only for a short time. I’m happy, because the performance improved during the weekend. It was nice because I felt strong, I just lacked a bit of luck at Turn 5, where I crashed.”

If he had been more patient, would the outcome of the race have been different? Bautista cannot predict it, but what he does know is that he still feels the desire to win and achieve successes like a young boy: “It’s easy to talk when things have already happened. Let’s say I’m 39, but inside I feel 18, I have the same hunger and desire for a rookie. It’s a beautiful thing, but sometimes it can be not so positive.”

Going into detail about the decisive episode, the Ducati rider explained: “He had gone a bit wide, I tried to cross the trajectory and at that moment I lost the front. However, I’m happy because I made a good comeback. Usually I lose tenths by tenths, but in the race it was the opposite. A strategy? I didn’t have one, I gave the best I could. At the moment I have nothing to lose, when I can give 100%, I do it”.

Far from the leader, Bautista is 142 points behind Razgatlioglu, so he feels he can give it his all without making too many calculations. Toprak took most of the advantage by taking advantage of Alvaro’s difficulties, who instead seems to have found the feeling he was missing until recently: “Until Most I wasn’t relaxed, I wondered why I couldn’t ride like last year. It’s not comfortable to ride like this, there were days when I didn’t know how to ride. I didn’t understand anything, it was as if I didn’t feel all the things we did on the bike”.

“Last year, a millimeter of change was enough and I could feel it. This year, even the biggest changes were barely perceptible. Instead, from Most I started to feel like last year again. It’s like my mind has forgotten what happened in the first races, so in the next races I will have the same feeling as in Most and Portimao. Now I know I can ride the bike,” explained Bautista.

Once he has regained the sensations of 2023, the Spaniard’s goal is to slow down the BMW rider’s pursuit of the world title. For this, he will need to return to winning ways, so as to prevent his rival from breaking another record. In Portimao, in fact, Razgatlioglu overtook the Ducati standard-bearer by winning 13 consecutive races (Alvaro stopped at 11). But Bautista still has the record of 27 wins in the season. Will he be able to keep this figure intact? “Last year I won 27 races and I would like to maintain that record. Today we were close to Toprak, we hope to make further steps forward in Magny Cours to continue closing the gap”.