When Scott Redding nearly bled to death in 2019: “I thought I wasn’t going to make it”

It is well known that Scott Redding began his first Superbike season in the winter of 2018/2019 with a broken thigh. He has only just revealed in detail on the ‘Scruff Bags by HMY’ podcast just how close he came to a very different outcome.

Half an hour without an ambulance

After his completely disastrous year with Aprilia, Redding had left MotoGP and signed for the team run by the late Paul Bird. A few days after training began in Spain, the carburettor valve on a minibike jammed, leaving the throttle open. Redding slammed on the brakes, lost the front end and slid through a gap in the tyre wall, beyond which lay a concrete manhole.

“That sliced open my thigh and my arm,” he said on the podcast. “I was lying on the track and bleeding heavily.” Dramatically, there was no ambulance on site. His training partner Jake Dixon and his mechanic Sam Neave tied off his leg with pieces of rope. “I could see the sheer fear on their faces. After twenty minutes, I said I couldn’t go on. Sam just kept shouting that I shouldn’t close my eyes.”

It was only after about half an hour that an ambulance arrived. In Valencia, Redding then lay in the hospital corridor for days because there were no rooms available. Dirt and stones had been forced into the wound during the open fracture, and the doctors were unable to remove these foreign bodies. His former team-mate Tito Rabat eventually organised private transport – “a van with a bed in the back”. It was a three-hour journey to Barcelona, without any painkillers. Once there, the fracture was properly treated.

Silence about the injury: “Nobody must know about it”

Then Bird got in touch, having learnt of the crash from Neave. Redding’s account: “You’re no use to me anymore.” The Brit asked for just one chance: the first test at Monteblanco. Bird agreed, on one condition: no one was to find out about the injury.

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The doctors estimated eight to ten weeks. Redding had four. “I didn’t contradict him,” he said. “I just had to pretend it wasn’t an option.” Weeks followed in which he practised walking up steps in the mornings, balanced in the sea, cried every day during physiotherapy, and tried in the evenings to manage a single full turn of the pedals on an ergometer. “They told me that as soon as I could move it, it would start to heal. That was the turning point for me.”

After three weeks, he was on a motocross bike; shortly afterwards, on a supermoto. “I wasn’t allowed to show that I was limping. That was the whole secret.”

At Monteblanco, Redding eventually set a lap record and was the fastest on both days. At the end of the season, he became the first rookie to be crowned British Superbike Champion.

Today, he puts his own achievement into perspective. “The difference is: I don’t know if I could still do that today. Back then, I simply had no other choice.”