If those racing for the MotoAmerica Mission King Of The Baggers Championship weren’t already worried about Troy Herfoss prior to the Road Atlanta round, they most definitely are now. Herfoss rode his S&S/Indian Motorcycles Challenger to a runaway victory in Sunday’s race held on drying pavement, beating his teammate Tyler O’Hara by 13.887 seconds.

The two factory Indian riders’ choice of using slick tires instead of full rains pretty much sealed the victory for Herfoss. The Australian took off from the start and motored away from the field, with O’Hara taking a bit more time to work his way to the runner-up spot.

Third place, and the first rider using rain tires, was the ever-popular Max Flinders on his Mad Monkey Motorsports Indian Challenger with the New Hampshire resident putting in maximum effort to keep RevZilla/Motul/Harley-Davidson’s Hayden Gillim behind him to score the final podium spot.

After three rounds and six races, Herfoss is now leading the championship by nine points over Harley-Davidson Factory Racing’s Kyle Wyman, who was fifth today.

“I was very confident it would be slicks, but I was unsure of the ruling whether I could start from pit lane,” Herfoss said. “We’ve got two bikes in Australia. I haven’t had a one-bike rule… Or one bike only. I don’t know if it’s a rule or not, but we’ve got one bike. So, that made me a little bit more cautious. But once we established, we had a lot of time to change the tires on the grid, I figured definitely I was going to go slicks but roll out in the wets. Take a nice slow lap, look at the track, get a bit of an idea of the guys going around pit lane. You can usually see what the confidence levels are like. It was slicks all the way. The only problem was two laps to go there was a couple of specks of rain. So, if the skies would have opened one to go, a big gap can come down. It was a weird race for me. I got a really big gap in the first two laps. The first lap especially, three seconds. Then it said five after lap two. I had already slowed down in my mind, and I assumed that everyone was on wets. Dane took the pit board down after the gap went out and just had the lap count. So, I was like, ‘Okay, the gap is going out a long way.’ Then when I hear Tyler’s (O’Hara) on slicks, I’m like, ‘Wow. I was way too cautious. He could have been coming fast.’ That’s what it was like. I’ve never been in that situation where I’ve literally gone off the start and in my mind, it was like, ‘Okay, I’ve won the race. Just don’t mess up.’ You’ve got no idea how nerve-racking that is when you’re in that position. How good is this? Indian one, two, and three. It’s a perfect weekend for me. I never would have dreamed that. A perfect weekend in this championship at all, let alone third weekend in the championship. So, it’s a real credit to the team that they can give me a bike that I can just concentrate on racing on and learning tracks. That’s the reason I’m able to be so competitive. So, I want to say thank you to them.