Bike Nut: The Doug Mulray Interview

“A Triumph 650 Bonneville was my second bike. My first – and it doesn’t delight me to tell you this – was a Honda 250.

When I bought the Bonneville, I had to endure all the jibes in the world from people who knew me. You know the stuff: ‘What’s the difference between a bucket of oil and a Triumph?’ (The oil stays inside the bucket, for the ignorant.) And: ‘Why do Pommies drink warm beer?

Because Lucas make the fridges.’

I did a lot of miles on the Triumph. I loved it. I had a mate called Wink — another looney — and we used to do 200 miles after work just for entertainment. We’d ride up to the Panorama Cafe in Bathurst, have a feed of sausages and veg, and come home again.

Wink didn’t actually work. He was a BMW freak. What he used to do was live off compensation claims. He’d put each BM he owned under a milk truck or something, collect a payout, stick some in the bank to live on and buy another BM with the rest.

He got an R90 in the end, after an accident that paid really well.

The Triumph let me down a couple of times, which was a bit heartbreaking. I don’t like it when a bike does that. I guess nobody does. But in those days it handled remarkably well, and had a great look and a great sound.

I pulled it to bits and reassembled it with new gaskets and other bits and generally set it up properly.

I painted the tank British racing green, polished all the side covers, and in the end it was a Mickey Mouse thing — very pukka British stuff, with TT100s, the lot.

But soon after that, in 1970, I sold it.

Well, actually, I traded it in on a Honda 750 Four.

I’d pulled up outside a bike shop — a place called Macintoshes, I think — in Military Road, and was just sitting on the Triumph in the driveway looking at this amazing new Honda Four.

I was contemplating buying a Norton at the time, because I’d seen Len Atlee clean up on one out at Amaroo, but this bloke came out of the shop and said ‘I’ve got a bloke who’s looking for a British racing green Bonneville, I’ll give you — I can’t remember exactly how much it was — for yours.’

It was a pretty good deal, so I traded the Bonneville on the Honda.

I was very impressed at first. It ran like a Swiss watch. In fact it was as though it had been built by a jeweller and not a bike mechanic. But it dragged everything and left trails of sparks everywhere.

I only had it for four months. It became a bit depressing.

I’m not one of those people who sits around and says that Nortons and Triumphs are better than any other bikes ever built — I mean, you would have to be a lunatic to ignore the advantages of contemporary technology — but they do have a flavour that doesn’t exist in today’s bikes.

You could work on them yourself, and as a result get a real idea of what was going on underneath you. I think a lot of guys who ride bikes now are completely ignorant about how they work, and I think that detunes your relationship with the bike.

Surely anyone who’s into bikes understands the idea of having a relationship with a bike. I mean, you get out there with a bike in the sticks and there’s a bond, a sympatico, and the more complex the bike becomes the harder it is to get that feeling.

So, I sold the Honda, and bought a Norton 750 Commando.

The Norton was a great bike, as long as it was properly maintained.

Unfortunately, I wrote it off coming back from the Bathurst races in 1974. Wink was on the back (he’d just stacked a BM, and was waiting for the compo cheque) and we were howling back to Sydney on The Bells Line of Road.

They handle pretty well, the old Nortons, and we were hooting. We’d actually worn a hole in the left side header pipe, so we were pretty loud too.

I spotted a bunch of guys up ahead on Honda fours. All their bikes were painted purple metalflake, and they all had colours on. Most of ’em probably had ‘Motherfucker’ tattooed on their forearms as well.

Anyway, Wink and I dropped right in on these guys and passed them all. Then they sat right on our date.

I went into a bend with a tightening radius — a left hander — and it just wouldn’t straighten out. I had the bike leaned over as far as she would go.

Then we started to drift out across the double yellow lines. I’m thinking ‘God help me if there’s anything coming the other way!’

And there it was: a Fairlane towing a caravan.

I’ve gone Whack!, straight into the front of it. Wink bailed out early. I bent the bars straight up as I went sailing over the car. It was amazing. I went so high that I bounced off the roof of the caravan — I left a big dent in it — without breaking anything, and rolled off down the road.

Now, the Fairlane is being driven by a dentist from South Australia, on his way home from seeing the rels at Easter. He hasn’t got far before this looney on a yellow Norton’s gone straight into the front of his car.

His wife’s freaked out. She’s jumped out of the car, raced down the road, and she’s standing over me (I’ve passed out) screaming ‘He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s DEAD!’

I’ve come to, with this lunatic female standing over me screaming that I’m dead. I’ve lifted up my visor and said ‘Madam, I am most anxious to refute that statement,’ and she’s passed out and fallen over, hitting her head on the road.

She was the worst injured person in the accident!

“I was a bit worried about Wink. ‘Where are ya, Wink?’ I yelled. ‘In the gutter,’ came the reply. ‘Where you fuckin’ belong, you bastard,’ was all I could say, as we both started to laugh.

They tried to lay a neg. driving charge on me, but the disc had been fractured in the accident and I told the policeman that it was metal fatigue and I had no brakes. He laughed as he wrote it on the sheet, but I didn’t get busted.

The old Norton was a mess, and although it was rebuilt I wasn’t too comfortable about the way it pointed when I got it back, so I sold it.

In the meantime, I borrowed a friend’s Honda 90.

It was an amazing thing. I loved it. It was a bucket of shit, with no brakes, horrible steering and a dreadful front end. I’d fill it up once every two weeks and it would cost about 70 cents.

I tried to double a girlfriend across the Roseville Bridge once, and it wouldn’t make it up the other side.

Then I went to England for a while, and rode a friend’s BSA Rocket Three, a very quick, very scary bike. The engine had been built for use in a sidecar, and the bike only had the drum brakes at the front. It was a great bike, but very hard to stop, especially in the wet.

I’d always liked Ducatis. I coveted the original 750 when it first came out. I was going to buy a yellow 750 Sport second hand, but then they released the 860, and there was quite a big rave on it, so I thought ‘Yeah, I’ll get one,’ when I got back from England.

It was a dog, a REAL dog.

I took it back to the dealer (who doesn’t sell Dukes any more) and said ‘This bike is fucked! It doesn’t go! It’s been terribly set up!’

They said ‘We’ll fix it for you, Mr Mulray’. I said ‘Not a problem.’

So I came back to pick it up, and rode it 100 yards up the street before I realised that they hadn’t touched it.

I went back and hit them with this and they said  ‘But we put new shims in it!’ I said ‘Well that’s interesting, because these things don’t have shims, just screw/locknut tappets’.

They said ‘Oh, err, well, ummm …’

‘You are full of shit,’ I said. ‘I don’t want this bike. The pipes are blue, it hasn’t even been pre-delivered properly.’

So we did a deal. They credited me with the full price of the GTE towards a GTS with an electric starter and the fat tank.

The starter was useless — I mean, we’re talking tits on a horse, here — so I ended up ripping it out.

I rode it for about 18 months — including doing a trip to Tasmania — very happily with no problems apart from the awful electrics. So I ripped the fuse box out and put one in from a Toyota Corolla.

I didn’t have any worries after that.

At this stage I was on the radio in Gosford. I thought it was about time I got a real grunty Ducati, so I bought a 900SS.

A bloke called Dave Bicknell from the Central Coast used to race Ducatis, and he heard me talking about the things on 2GO and offered to set mine up properly as soon as I’d picked it up from the dealer.

We stripped it down at 1600 km after I’d run it in, and took out that sludge trap which the dealer never cleans, and after we’d set it up right I never had any trouble with it at all.

It was a fantastic bike. It handled beautifully, and was perfectly reliable. The best ride I ever had was on the SS, again up on the Central Coast, with Dave Bicknell and another bloke called Danny Pauletto, who’s dead now.

Tony Hatton wanted Dave to run in his Six Hour BMW R100S, Danny had an MV Agusta 750, and I had the Ducati — three immaculate European bikes, all in perfect condition.

We took off and went up to Cessnock, down the Putty, out to Windsor and back up to Gosford again.

Rides like this are rare, but brilliant. You ride for mile after mile thinking ‘The bastards have got to back off.’ You hit the front and suddenly they’re up your arse. You’re not going to back off, and the gap they’re looking for just isn’t there. You end up riding flat out for three or four hours. It’s an amazing mix of terror and pleasure. You come back with so much adrenalin in your system, you can’t sleep for a week.

I moved down to Melbourne and one day I took my wife for a blast on the Duke up to Eildon Weir and the Healesville State Forest. It’s beautiful, with great left and right sweepers in the middle of this dense forest with really tall trees.

My wife and I were into the full thing at this stage: black riding gear with blue helmets to match the fairing, with Ducati stickers across the back. It was pretty Flash Harry stuff.

We rode up there, had lunch, and were on our way back to Melbourne.

We were right in the guts of the state forest, and I saw a bunch of Japanese bikes up ahead. At this time it was things like Kawasaki 1000s. They didn’t see me. I came over a hill from miles back and thought ‘This will be good. I’ll drop inside the boys at speed and outrun ’em’.

Every time I do this I end up in hospital or in a police station.

There were about half a dozen of them, all travelling at around 140 km/h, and I’ve slotted the big twin right up the inside and got ’em all by surprise.

They came after me and we were rolling right along at about 160-170 km/h. It was beautiful high speed, fast sweeping corner stuff, except coming ’round a right hander I hit one of those waves of bitumen that trucks push up, right at the apex.

Now the Duke’s suspension was pretty stiff, and it just fired my wife straight up in the air and off the back of the bike.

I felt two claws grip my shoulders, and she was flying out behind the bike like a flag, at about 100 miles an hour.

Then she came down with her crutch landing on that little fibreglass bit behind the seat.

I thought ‘I WILL NEVER HAVE SEX AGAIN!’

I didn’t say a word to her. She wouldn’t let go. I just backed off, cruised into Melbourne, put it in the garage, and advertised it in the paper.

I just can’t keep my head under control. The ego goes berserk with the old European vs Japanese bike thing, and I can’t resist the temptation of having a go.

I haven’t had a bike full time since, but I think I’ve got a much better attitude now than I had then. I couldn’t start a bike up without thinking I was Mike Hailwood.

I’d never been into Harley Davidsons, and one day I was slagging them on Triple M. Frasers Harley Davidson called and asked me if I’d ridden one. Well, to be fair, I said I hadn’t. I just always had the impression that they were fairly slow, clunky motorbikes.

I mean, I got into bikes because I was young and foolish and wanted to go fast. I liked the exhilaration of moving through more than one plane at one time. I wanted to lay things down and scratch bits of metal on the ground.

On a Harley you can do that before you even take it off the stand.

So Frasers lent me an 1100 Sportster for a while. I loved it, but everything I had always believed about Harleys was true. It didn’t really go round corners, it wasn’t particularly comfortable, it vibrated and wasn’t very quick.

But I liked it. It had class.

I’m going to buy another bike soon, but I’m not sure which way to go.

I like the idea of that new four valve head Duke, but then again I wouldn’t mind another big Ducati twin like a Hailwood Mille or something.

I like the Paso, but the 750 Pantah motor doesn’t appeal to me as much as the old big twin. I’d like something with Contis hanging off it.

I think Ducatis probably give you a bit of the exotic flavour and feel of a traditional bike with the handling and performance of contemporary motorcycles thrown in. The best of both.

You get the taste, but you don’t have to sell out to high tech. I liked the Harley experience, but I don’t think I’d ever have one in the garage somehow.

One of those new four valve Dukes will sit in there next to the Ferrari quite nicely, I think.”

As told to Bill McKinnon. Two Wheels, February 1988.