The British Historic Racing season started, as is tradition, at Mallory Park. Mixed weather failed to dampen the action, as Mike Yiend reports.
Andy Pike ran away with the first BEARS outing, taking his 600 Ducati TT2 to a 22 second win. He sat out the wet Saturday afternoon race but returned on Sunday with another win and a second place despite facing far stiffer opposition from Gary Porter’s Trident than he’d received the day before.Mike Bevan had a successful weekend taking comfortable wins in the first and last D&M Engineering Japanese air-cooled class aboard his DCM Honda XL (seen here) and backed it up with two further wins on his more familiar Norton in the over 500cc class.New to the increasingly popular BEARS sidecar class was the very pretty Guzzi Le Mans outfit of Steven Kemp and Simon Clover, providing a little Italian flair amongst the ‘Flying Bricks’ that make up the bulk of the entry. The new combo had a best placing of 5th over the weekend.Probably the most dominant performance of the weekend was that of Richard Molnar in the Goodwin Championship for 350cc machines. He won all four races by a country mile on his 350 Manx, taking the first by getting on for 50 seconds.After being sidelined for a large part of last season, Mervyn Stratford and his giant-killing 250 Rudge were back with a vengeance, winning all four pre-1963 250cc races. He battled all weekend with Stuart Noble (65), who had a hat-trick of wins in the Pre-1972 class for the overall honours, taking an outright win in the last race.With passenger Jono Borrington throwing all kinds of shapes to keep the rear wheel gripping, driver Stephen Stephenson took their 750 BSA to all four wins in the 750cc Pre-72 sidecar class.
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