TYRE dramas couldn’t stop Bathurst’s Corey Forde from successfully defending his Period 4 title at the recent Australian Historic Road Racing Championships.
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Forde didn’t have an ideal setup for his 1970 Honda CB 1204 to take on Wakefield Park Raceway but he recovered from qualifying dramas with a determined performance.
The Bathurst rider won all four on his races in the Unlimited Period 4 battle.
However, with the way things started out for Forde at Wakefield it wasn’t looking like an ideal setup for a title defence.
“The tyres that we were going to use got stuck at customs. We were struggling in qualifying with the old tyres we had,” Forde said.
“We tried a new front tyre and when that was working we tried it on the back as well. It wasn’t ideal but it worked for us.”
In Friday’s opening two qualifying sessions Forde was busy playing catch up with South Australia’s David Johnson and his 1972 Ducati Imola 1063 and Victoria’s Aaiden Coote, on a 1972 Triumph Trident 750.
While he was close to a second off the pace in the opening session Forde got within half a second of the top Period 4 time in the next qualifying window.
Mechanical troubles put Johnson out of the equation in Saturday’s opening race but Forde still had a speedy Coote to contend with.
Forde got ahead of Coote over the five lap race to gain the upper hand.
We were really rapt in the end after all those early dramas.
- Corey Forde
Johnson was back with a vengeance in race two but Forde was able to hold him off by just over a tenth of a second in an intense race.
Forde produced his best race lap of the weekend in race two, one minute and 7.535 seconds.
On Sunday it was once again a two-man battle at the top of the Period 4 pile when the mechanical dramas in Johnson’s Ducati couldn’t be resolved.
Forde held off Coote over the final two races to make it a clean sweep.
The Bathurst rider finished eighth overall in both races when taking into account the Formula 750cc Period 6 competitors taking part.
“We were really rapt in the end after all those early dramas,” Forde said.
“I had support from my father-in-law, one of my best mates and Hugh Robinson, who puts our engines together.
“We were fighting against a really strong rider, David Johnson, who has raced at the Isle of Man TT before. He was right in there on the first day but he had some clutch dramas and we managed to get him on the line.
“it’s great to race against someone like him though. He was straight off to the Macau GP after this.”
Forde was also aiming for a ride in the competitive Period 5 category but bike troubles of his own arrived.
Luckily for Forde he’d walked away with his number one goal completed.
“In the second qualification session we had a mechanical issue and that was the end for us,” he said.
“Period 4 was the race that we were really pushing for and in Period 5 we just wanted to see how we’d go against some strong riders, because it always seems to be the best-contested class.”