Bathurst 1974

You know the scene which is stuck on the end of all motor racing films?

The one where the hero wanders out on to the deserted track opposite the grandstands. It’s dusk, and a chill wind plays with errant scraps of paper discarded by the thousands who only hours before had thronged the area.

Head down, shoulders hunched, hands dug deep into the pockets of a $150 jacket complete with British Racing Drivers Club badge, he makes his way to the middle of the starting grid. Beginning with a medium distance low angle shot the camera pans past him, then closes in on the streaks of rubber left by spinning tyres. Flash to one-second shot of cars roaring off line, simultaneous audio of screaming motors.

Hero thinks of best mate, trapped in blazing wreck after being forced off road by villain; thinks of villain, losing race (upon which depended the Championship of the Entire World) to him (hero) by a wheel width; thinks of the birds who sometimes he has loved and lost. More often, he has loved and won, and as the camera zooms back for a high-level, long distance shot, he is joined by a female figure which detaches itself from the shadows at the track edge.

Together, they walk towards the hero’s hand built Porsche Targa, complete with super special prototype flat 12 motor (imagine trying to keep that idling at traffic lights?)

The previously muted warblings of the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra rise to a frantic crescendo, the sun sinks into a whirlpool of colours plucked from an LSD trip and the closing credits roll across the screen…

All good predictable stuff. Producers and directors are hooked on it. Naturally, reality very seldom obliges with the same sort of scene. But once in a while …

Motorcycle journalists would have to be the toughest mob of hard-nosed pragmatists around, but I tell you, I wandered out on to the finish line area of Mount Panorama at 6.30 pm on Easter Sunday and there was a kind of special, spooky happy feeling around.

It wasn’t the perfect setting for the classic scene; a few people were still coming down Con Rod off the Mountain, but it was close. The gathering gloom was right, and the scraps of paper, and the chilly wind.

An 86 piece orchestra you can always do without, and if you close your eyes there’s no need for a blazing sunset. It only needed a touch of imagination and all the sights and sounds of the weekend rushed back. They happened only a few hours, at the most two days, ago. Yet already they’d taken the aspect of legend. Tucked away in some special corner of a tired brain, many of the weekend’s events had telescoped in on one another. Details were getting confused, facts were slipping further out of focus.

Not all. Not the very special scenes:

Like the sight of a racing bike elevating the front wheel at top speed, the rider leaning up and forward to bring it gently back to the ground. Like the brain-rattling blast of noise which followed the Unlimited GP field off the grid. Like the frilled lizard, perched on a spectator’s shoulder at Reid Park and sipping from a can of beer.

Like the first carton of milk on a furry tongue at 7am.

Like the mud of Friday and Saturday.

The mud! If one thing looked like dashing the Auto Cycle Union’s fond hopes of a biggest-ever Bathurst it was the pre-Easter weather. Four days of consistent rain had turned the camping area and the pits into a sea of clinging grey goop. Fussy road racing machines had to be coaxed through conditions which would daunt a motocross expert.

Riders corning back in from the unofficial Thursday practices, shaky after battling with wind squalls and a rain-soaked, muddy circuit, were standing propped against mired motorcycles, heads hung like broken-down horses, oblivious to everything but raw lungs and legs which had turned to jelly.

The canny ones shifted their machinery close to the circuit gates; the rest gained instant fitness. Mud stuck to tyres and had to be scraped off before going on to the track. Only there was this patch of it right in the gateway, and your nice clean tyres got all gunged up again, and the first lap had to be taken really carefully in case the slimy mess pitched you off.

Leathers, once damp, stayed damp. Matches were reluctant to strike. Boots squelched. Where was the sunshine Bathurst always produced at Easter? Somewhere in Western Australia, according to the Met Office.

Faced with problems like this, organisation tends to run astray, and tolerance is scarce. So it proved early on a dripping Friday morning.

Mud and gravel was being swept off the track across the Mountain, so practice was going to be delayed. Some of the flag points were still not manned, and machine scrutineering was slow underway. The 50-metre queue of shivering riders and pit crews waiting for business to begin were in no mood for fun and games. Neither were the machine examiners.

The first blow came with orders that leathers, checked the day before, had to be worn and checked again. Grumbling riders left bikes with mates and sloshed off to collect their gear.

Slowly the line started to move, and immediately stopped as racing numbers began to be bounced. Bathurst is a particularly hard track to lap-score on, the bikes flashing across the view of the team in the tower at the start/finish line, and legibility was being insisted upon. However, this insistence took the form of a rigid adherence to such things as number width, and some beautifully signwritten and quite legible examples had to have hasty repaints done on them.

Into the maelstrom of heightened tempers came ACU President Arthur Blizzard, to be jumped by riders demanding to know what crazy tactics were being pulled, and by machine examiners equally incensed at the competitors’ attitude. As must have happened a hundred times during the meeting, Arthur was forced into the role of whipping boy/mediator. He’s realistic enough to know that such is the lot of every promoter, and one of the jobs he has to do, but by 10am he must have begun to wonder if it was all worth it.

It had to be, it just had to. When two years ago the famous carnival was able to boast prize money of $10,000 it was hailed as a significant plateau. Now, for the first time since 1937, bikes had Mount Panorama for the entire weekend, and prizemoney had been boosted to $20,000.

Road racing had greatness thrust upon it with the decision of the Australian Racing Drivers Club, after the 1973 meeting, to drop their Easter Sunday races. While motorcycling had been gaining strength over the years, the Easter car crowd had been dropping away. Traditionally, the ACU of NSW has used Bathurst profit for yearly administration costs. A two-day meeting promised larger crowds, a bigger entry list, but also meant doubled costs in fees to Bathurst Council and all back-up facilities.

Preparations had started early, or so it had seemed at the time, several months before. But a voluntary organisation has its work cut out handling something as big as Bathurst, and, with three months to go, the search for sponsorship was still not complete. Nor was there any certainty as to what riders, if any, would be coming from New Zealand and the US to compete.

Lessons learnt over the years were finally being heeded in some areas though. Professional publicity had been arranged, a move which would have brought on mass apoplexy among the union’s more traditional officials even four years ago. Many still had serious reservations, but the progressive element was able to win the point, if grudgingly.

From the outside, problems like this may seem unimportant, but sporting organisations are slow to move with the times. What we saw this year were the first tentative steps towards what road racing could well become – a well­promoted professional spectator sport.

The issue of riders was not fully resolved until the eleventh hour, when expatriate Englishman Ron Grant decided to come from the US and bring his 20-year-old protege, Pat Hennan. Hennan’s win in the Junior supporting race at Daytona was the first that most Australians had heard of him, and many people had reservations about his worth. As it turned out, we had the chance to see a rider of enormous talent who displayed smoothness far greater than short involvement with road racing would indicate.

The question of costs and sponsorship was another cliffhanger until Rothmans agreed to support the meeting under their Chesterfield banner. Experienced in motor sport promotion·through four-wheeler activities, the company is showing an increasing interest in motorcycles. With their support, Bathurst was ready to move into the big time. Road racing was coming of age.

Early on Friday morning such a comment would have been met with pessimistic derision. A petrol strike had slowed Sydney to a crawl, the weather was foul, the spectators seemed to be slow arriving and nothing seemed to be shaping up right.

Those hardy souls among the fans who had arrived the night before were establishing their sodden camp sites on top of the Mountain. Strangely, most didn’t look too miserable, possibly because they belonged to that tough and stoic group who would turn up at Bathurst no matter what the conditions. The rest were still at home, waiting to see what the weather did, or queueing for petrol.

As the day progressed so the tantalising hint of better things to come grew stronger. A stream of bikes began arriving at the circuit – not as much as the average Friday crowd, but still heartening. The clouds started to lift, the rain showers became less frequent. Perhaps, perhaps …

The woes of the riders were not over yet. With several extra classes and events on the extended program, practice had promised to be a hectic affair under any circumstances. By midday, it had degenerated to the level of utter confusion. Riders were turning up at the circuit gate at stated times to be told they couldn’t go out, another class was still practising.

Minutes later they would see one of their competitors flash past. Angry scenes. Unlimited A-Grade entries were getting mixed up with Lightweight C-Grade, and the 80 km/h speed differential on the straight was scaring both sides. More angry scenes. The thin air of the Tablelands city normally calls for extensive rejetting, but this year the damp conditions had introduced another complicating factor.

The riders of the fourteen TZ700 Yamahas at Mount Panorama were facing the additional problems of being unfamiliar with their mounts. Many had only just taken delivery. Bathurst is bad enough to relearn after a year or two without the complication of a new and awesomely powerful mount.

Few of the 700 riders were grumbling though. The big four­cylinder rocketships were proving easy to handle, pulling hard over a huge band, starting easily, running cleanly. One didn’t have to be finicky about being in precisely the right gear at any spot. A six-speed close ratio box coupled with the power spread allowed for a healthy margin.

The few who were giving their mounts the stick down the straight began to filter in looking thoughtful. Speeds were way up on the 240 km/h of the 350s, and funny things were happening over the infamous second-last hump on Con Rod. At 270 km/h the front wheels were lifting well clear of the road – with the machines capable of 285, this called for gentle handling in the latter section of the straight.

Those who tried a nearly full-throttle approach had to contend not only with the hump. Patching of the bitumen opposite the Drive-in Theatre causes any bike to hop around, and the big movers were jumping clear of the ground. Anyone brave enough to endure that would then have both wheels clear as the bike crested the hump.

Few attempted this trick more than once; it was the sort of effect which makes you happy to be on terra firma. What makes that hump on Con Rod special is the way it’s formed. Rather than the little sort of jog as is found on the Isle of Man, and which kicks the bike clear of the ground, it is effectively the top of a gentle rise where the track levels off. At high speeds it acts as a launching ramp, the bikes clawing at the sky with their front wheels.

The top of the hump is 500 metres out from Murray’s corner; where the track again drops away is opposite the 300 metre braking sign. The length between is all the riders have to bring the front wheel back down and prepare to brake. Most of the big bike competitors were going for the anchors at the 300 metre point – the bravest or most skilled were leaving it a few metres further. One thing’s for sure: you can’t leave it much further.

To haul a bike down from the 270 km/h of the straight to the 80-odd needed to negotiate Murray’s calls for a deceleration of just on 1G. For years it was popularly assumed that this was the theoretical limit of braking forces. Such is not the case, but the best brakes on a good surface with good tyres seldom yield much better.

Occasionally one of our road test bikes achieves nearly l.lG in a 100-0 km/h panic stop. That normally scares us out of five years’ growth. How the racing competitors do the same lap after lap from nearly three times the speed (which means eight times the distance!) is quite beyond comprehension.

So as Friday progressed things began looking brighter. Nobody was turning in startling times, the fastest during the late afternoon official practice being Warren Willing at 2m 31.7s. However, the gap between the 700 and 750 machines and the smaller ones was already showing. At 2m 35.3s, Victorian Bob Rosenthal was the fastest of the 350s, while fellow Victorian Greg Johnson was marginally slower on his Kawasaki 500. These were the only two in the top 16 qualifiers not mounted on a 750-class machine.

And most of them were on Yamaha 700s – the big red and white machines were going to be the ones to beat. Times of 2m 33.3s and 2m 35.3s had the Kawasaki of Toombs and the Suzuki of Hennan on third and fifth grid positions. If both bikes fired well, something they weren’t renowned for, the two triples had a chance, although they still had to contend with the two chargers on the 700s, Hansford and Willing.

Two of the new machines were already effectively out of the fight. Ross Barelli’s had blown a crankcase seal, and Gary Thomas was nursing an injured wrist, suffered when the gearbox of his 125 had locked, tossing him on to the track. A few laps on the 700 had shown him there was more than enough power, and the sort which needs firm handling. Wisely, he decided an injured wrist wasn’t the sort of thing to control such a projectile.

With the lifting of the weather late on Friday came an increased migration of visitors, and with the visitors came the police, intent on making it a quietest ever Bathurst. In that respect they were successful – little trouble was reported in the area during the carnival.

Police activity extended to stopping riders approaching the circuit on Friday and Saturday and turning back the less savory. Out and out derros certainly aren’t welcomed by the racing crowd at Bathurst, but it can get hard to determine whether a guy’s a ratbag or not if he has long hair, a beard, and a cut-down denim jacket.

The influence of the constabulary extended to a visit from the Licensing Branch on one of the carnival’s oldest traditions -the Saturday evening drink-up at the Family Hotel. A favourite lodging place and watering hole for competitors, the Family has seen the gathering carry on into the night many a time in the past. This year it was everybody out at 10.15 in no uncertain terms.

Among the crowd ushered from the bar by the boys in blue were some of their own ranks from Sydney who were lodging at the establishment and who were at the time off-duty. Still, when you’re being roared at to drop your beer and move or else you’ll be booked, it’s hardly the time to identify yourself. Could have been mighty embarrassing.

If the night time activities were predictable enough, enlivened by mild action, the daytime ones were a whole different set-up. From the first lap of the first event on Saturday right through to the end of the Sidecar Handicap on Sunday it was excitement plus. The weather improved hourly, with Sunday a typical Bathurst day, and sensing that it was going to be a special meeting the crowds rolled in.

The two-day format allowed for many more events; for the first time there was a 250 B and C-Grade race plus two for C-Grade only. These could have been tame – many of the riders had only been racing a few months and were having their first rides on Mount Panorama. That didn’t stop them riding with the same fire as the experts, and thrilling the spectators with close tussles and even closer finishes.

Extra sidecar events, a race for historic machines and the two Unlimited Formula Rounds filled out the usual program. All were well worth the inclusion. The Unlimited Formula heats allowed riders to come to grips with their big machines before the all­-important Unlimited GP. Gregg Hansford, the stylish and consistent National Champion, headed them home in both rounds to take the pointscore and the money.

Round One – and the whole weekend – was marred by Bryan Hindle’s heavy fall at McPhillamy. He had been dicing with Hansford for the lead all race and was on the last lap when an outside passing move came unstuck. Offloading at the ton is never good news – severe though his injuries were, they could have been even worse. And exciting though the major races were, Bryan would have made them even closer contests.

With so many top-class races, highlights are hard to pick. Ron Toombs’ mastery of the Mountain circuit after a two-year absence was good to watch, and he was rewarded with wins in both the Junior and Senior GPs. His Junior win was quite a cliffhanger, as he struggled to stay ahead of the fast-closing Hansford. The exhaust pipe of Ron’s Yamaha 350 had fractured, cutting power and an early advantage was being whittled back fast at the flag.

The two events which captured crowd interest even before they were run were the Unlimited Production and the Unlimited GP. Both were long, 20-lappers; both had top-class fields and huge prizemoney. Warren Willing started favourite for the Production and scored a start-to-finish victory, but the action behind him kept the crowd on their toes for the whole event. Tom Gibson and John Crawford hurled their Kawasaki 900s around the track as if they were 125s, in contrast to the steady fourth across the line of Tony Hatton on the Ducati 750 Sport.

But the event everyone waited for was the battle of the super­machines, the Unlimited GP. And what a race. When the smoke had cleared, Warren Willing and Gregg Hansford had firmly established themselves as stars. Within one second of each other all race, they finished with Warren a wheel-width ahead of Gregg. Nothing closer can be imagined, except a dead heat, which would have been a fitting result.

Not only at the front was the action close. Right through the field groups of two, three and four riders raced wheel to wheel. Toombs and Hennan, both master stylists, tussled over second for most of the race until a worn tyre scared the American with a horrifying slide at Murray’s and he held back. The Yamaha 700s dominated the rest of the placings and proved how close on talent many of our riders are.

The two fastest New Zealanders, John Boote and Keith Turner, figured in race-long dices with Bob Rosenthal and Ken Blake from Victoria, Trevor Wood from Queensland, and New South Wales rider Laurie Barnett. As a race, the Unlimited will be spoken about for years.

And as a meeting, Bathurst ’74 will command the same attention. From a shaky start, it more than fulfilled early hopes for its success. Racing was dominated by the incredible Yamaha TZ700s, undoubted top dog of the tar circuits only three months after their debut. They were a factor in the meeting’s success, but only one of many. The two-day format worked, the faith showed by Chesterfield worked, the pre-race publicity and excellent Press facilities on course worked, the weather finally worked.

There were problems. sure, and lessons to be learned. But standing on that empty grid on Sunday night I couldn’t help feeling that finally, after a long and confused adolescence, Australian road racing had come of age.

By Brian Cowan. Two Wheels, July 1974.