As you probably know my business editor is one of the many tens of motorcycle enthusiasts (or as I like to call them, temporary Australians) who read a paper. For some months now he has been pressuring me to devote this whole column to two wheels. Even bike riders know there aren’t too many job openings in the media caper, so today here’s The Weekend Australian’s bumper bike edition.
Let’s start with Valentino Rossi, probably the greatest rider of all time, except for my editor.
He’s old (for a bike rider), he has hardly broken anything on his body, it’s been eight years since he won the Moto GP championship, he has a crook Yamaha motorcycle with pretty ordinary tyres but after three rounds he is leading the championship. Let’s not get too excited, after all there’s 15 rounds to go, but he’s even ahead of his very fast teammate, Maverick Vinales, who crashed out on the second lap of last week’s race at Austin, Texas.
Talking of crashing out, there’s been a lot of that going on in this week’s Targa Tasmania. The best sign-writer to come out of Western Australia since Alan Bond, Stu Liddle and his navigator Craig Stampfli were cruising the very tough and damp 14.08km forest run on the first day when their Evo just slid off the road, down an embankment, and flipped on top of a tree stump which promptly pierced the roof, missing Craig’s head by a whisker.
It wasn’t a great day for Sandgropers. Byron Ellement and Dean McLardy were just rallying along minding their own business when their Ford Focus decided to crash and catch fire. For non-rally driving readers, having your car go up in smoke is not part of the fun. Anyway, Byron and Dean climbed out the windows while six friendly competitors sprayed fire extinguishers on the Ford and them.
Back to the bikes.
Last week the Bonhams Stafford Sale went off. A punter online paid $280,677 against a pre-sale estimate of $102,000 for a 1949 Vincent HRD 988cc White Shadow Series-C Project. This was a bike that hadn’t been ridden for over 40 years. Another Vincent, a 1951 HRD 998cc Rapide Series-C, sold for nearly double the estimate at $72,788.
Not saying that all bike riders are into leather but a set of racing leathers (like a car racing suit but kinkier) used by Kiwi champion Graeme Crosby at the 1983 6-Hour Castrol Australian Endurance Grand Prix doubled its estimate at $4710, and the leathers Mike Hailwood rode in at the 1978 Bathurst Grand Prix went through the roof at $12,422.
If, like me, you are bored by all this bike stuff, this week’s Weekend Australian Magazine is a really good read. I can’t go with you because I need to keep writing this and keep my job.
OK, even I get off on VTR Customs’ BMW R65 “Willoughby 65”. My friend Dani Weidmann is Swiss and a bike rider (two strikes there) but he builds the best custom bikes this side of Geneva. VTR are a small group of BMW motorcycle fanatics who tune and rebuild bikes. Dani’s most famous creation is his Poliza Uno, an ex-Swiss Police Rt80 that he turned into the world’s fastest police bike. “We mounted a supercharger, fuel injection and on top of a nitrous oxide system,” Dani says.
This year, Dani wanted to build a vintage bike for himself. “I was thinking about my childhood. I live and run my business on the shore of Lake Zurich. As a little boy, I spent my summer vacations at my uncle’s boat rental business and fishing on the lake,” Dani said.
Now this is where it gets a bit weird but he is a motorbike rider after all. “I am a great fan of 60s movies with Doris Day and Rock Hudson. One of my favourite movies is Man’s Favorite Sport? with Rock Hudson as a bestselling writer on fishing, but who had never caught a fish in his whole life. In that movie, there was everything 60s — the equipment, the clothing, the colours, the lifestyle — everything what I connect as 60s. So that’s the perfect storyline for my new vintage bike! The movie character was named Willoughby, my year of birth was 65, the base bike was an R65 and we live lakeside.
“So, the Willoughby 65 was born and designed in my mind as a 1960s-style fisherman’s bike with a Brat-Low Rider ultra-clean look and a mounted vintage fishing rod and a paddle. To support that look, we integrated a Motogadget Tiny Tacho into the gas tank, which of course matches my Aviation Watch collection with a custom-made facehand by Zeitzone Zurich. We have spent a lot of time to get a vintage blue with ivory white colour scheme which got an intimate 60s feeling,” says Dani.
