BLOWN BOXER

Australia’s Troy Corser marked the 20th anniversary staging of the UK’s Goodwood Revival in 2018 by thundering to his debut victory in the Barry Sheene Memorial Trophy event — the world’s most prestigious Historic road race, which that year catered for pre-1954 bikes up to 1,000cc.

He did so together with Austrian teammate Herbert Schwab aboard the oldest bike in the race, a supercharged 1929 500cc BMW R57 Kompressor boxer twin owned and prepared by Herbert’s father Paul Schwab, 72, a retired Nissan dealer from near Salzburg, whose hobby for the past 50 years been restoring, tuning and racing vintage BMWs. “Troy is an extremely nice guy, who’s incredibly skilled as well as so cheerful, and good to have around,” said Paul. “How he rides the bike is just unbelievable — with no testing beforehand he was immediately fast when he rode it for the first time ever in qualifying at Goodwood.”

Double World Superbike champion Corser came from behind in the second of the two 25-minute races held on the Duke of Richmond’s historic 2.4-mile Goodwood circuit, to catch and pass the previous winners of this event, 23-time Isle of Man TT winner John McGuinness and teammate Glen English on a 1953 500cc Manx Norton. In scoring victory in Race 2 by 14.47 seconds aboard the venerable BMW, Corser and Schwab overcame the 8.40-second time deficit the BMW-mounted duo had incurred in Race 1 held the previous day, when Troy stalled the bike at the Le Mans start, and was only 15th out of the 30 starters at the end of the first of the 16 laps. But by circulating four seconds faster than McGuinness to set successive lap records, and thanks to a 10mph top speed advantage over the TT ace’s Norton (126mph vs. 116mph), he pulled the BMW up to third place before handing over to Schwab. The Austrian rider, a KTM development technician in his day job, bravely held that place