Image: Fourohfour.

KTM Enduro Racing Team’s Toby Price was unable to bounce back from an off start to the 2014 Yamaha Australian Four-Day Enduro (A4DE), eventually scoring a solid second Outright and in E2 at the event’s conclusion.

Price enjoyed a Herculean struggle with defending A4DE champion Daniel Milner, winning his fair share of special tests, but ultimately a slow start to the event for Price saw the two-time champion yield time to Milner over days one and two on the way to the runner-up position.

The early deficit proved to be a perfect illustration of the competitiveness between the two as Price pushed right to the limit on day three, winning five special tests on his KTM 450 EXC and pulling back significant time on Milner, but a crash in the final test saw him drop 13 seconds and he could only finish the day on the same second.

Price led Milner home in the final moto, but fell 25 seconds short of a third-career A4DE Outright win.

“The week went fairly good; I wasn’t too switched on in the first couple of days and it’s just unfortunate that I couldn’t claw it back,” Price explained. “But that’s part of racing, you’ve got to take the good with the bad, and the bad wasn’t so bad.

“On the third day I tried to do the best I could and I had about a 13-second lead for the day, and unfortunately I had a crash in the last test that gave all that time back and things were a bit too tight to do that.

“Over the four days of racing we had roughly 29 or 30 tests, so the difference probably averages out at about a half a second per test, so it was pretty close. Obviously it’s disappointing not to get KTM and the boys up on the top step, but we’ll just try and make it up somewhere else.”

KTM 250 EXC-F-mounted Peter Boyle leapt from the blocks on day one to lead the E1 class, ultimately finishing second in the category behind Tom McCormack, with American guest Mike Brown third.

Tayla Jones finished with her best-ever A4DE result, taking second in the Women’s category behind Jess Gardner and ahead of Emelie Karlsson.