  Gravitational waves emitted from a generic binary black-hole merger carry
away linear momentum anisotropically, resulting in a gravitational recoil, or
"kick", of the center of mass. For certain merger configurations the time
evolution of the magnitude of the kick velocity has a local maximum followed by
a sudden drop. Perturbative studies of this "antikick" in a limited range of
black hole spins have found that the antikick decreases for retrograde orbits
as a function of negative spin. We analyze this problem using a recently
developed code to evolve gravitational perturbations from a point-particle in
Kerr spacetime driven by an effective-one-body resummed radiation reaction
force at linear order in the mass ratio $\nu\ll 1$. Extending previous studies
to nearly-extremal negative spins, we find that the well-known decrease of the
antikick is overturned and, instead of approaching zero, the antikick increases
again to reach $\Delta v/(c\nu^{2})=3.37\times10^{-3}$ for dimensionless spin
$\hat{a}=-0.9999$. The corresponding final kick velocity is
$v_{end}/(c\nu^{2})=0.076$. This result is connected to the nonadiabatic
character of the emission of linear momentum during the plunge. We interpret it
analytically by means of the quality factor of the flux to capture
quantitatively the main properties of the kick velocity. The use of such
quality factor of the flux does not require trajectories nor horizon curvature
distributions and should therefore be useful both in perturbation theory and
numerical relativity.
