2011 1 hour races, Wakefield Park

Well it's that time again: off to Goulbourn; not a series pointscoring event, but certainly a fun one at that with the 1 Hour events for sharing one bike with another rider. I had invited Richard Easton to co-ride the FZ750. He was also riding a YZF750 in saturday's races in the PreModern class. Richard rode my bike on saturday afternoon and to my surprise said he wasn't sure if he wanted to race it! It was too weird apparantly, being compared with his YZF; the seating is lower, the scraping of fairings and exhaust at max lean was maybe freaking him out? Anyway, discussing this over dinner at the local workers club meant I had to line up another co-rider quicksmart, and the next morning all the planets aligned seeing that Brett Hope had crashed his ride and broken a collarbone, leaving Rob Cole without a corider as well! After a lot of ribbing of Richard about not wanting to ride this beastly FZ (with more to come to be sure) Rob jumped at the chance to ride his competition's bike! 

I opted to do the LeMans running start, and got a great start from our 1st in class and 11th on the grid qualifying position amongst a field of 1995 Premodern bikes with many A graders mixing it up.


Well blow me away I was 3rd into turn one! After settling down from the almost corner-overshooting turn 4 as some of the more modern faster bikes started passing, I got into a steady pace with my main aim not only to lead the F750 field but also to try and keep Richard's YZF750 behind us. After all it would have added extra spice to beat him after he opted to not ride my older bike! However, after some great stoushes with Stu Lomax also on a YZF750SP, and Richard, keeping him at bay for 8 laps, he gradually got past me by the end of the first half hour and I came in to hand over to Rob, who had only a few laps in the morning's practice to get used to the bike. Rob fell into his consumate fast and steady pace fairly quickly, and ended up lapping within fractions of my best laptime! Seems the bike wasn't that weird after all   :) Rick went on with co-rider Mr Slade to get 2nd outright.

Keeping abreast of Ken lindsay's CBR900R Fireblade with Glenn Hindle piloting.

By the end of the hour long race, we had moved from our 11th outright qualifier to 7th outright and 1st in the F750 class, lapping the second F750 team of Steve Anderson and Scott Cunningham. In fact we would have been 2nd in older Period 6 F1 class as well, though we were not able to enter the bike in both these classes. Rob was chuffed at our finish and took home another trophy! 

In the support races on saturday I took home 1st place also for the F750 class and 3rd in the F1 class, making the weekend's tally 3 tophies!

Rob Cole punting my bike around

Co-rider Rob Cole and my pitcrew for the weekend, Mick Collins, ex-bucket and GSX1100 FE Racer

Thanks to Thumper for use of photos. There are no Videos unfortunately due to a hardware problem no the day.
Next stop: Broadford Victoria for the year's last pointscoring event, where any one of us 3 can take the series home!