The other day I bemoaned the passing of Sydney’s two road racing circuits, Amaroo Park and Oran Park, both eaten up by Sydney’s urban sprawl and NIMBY residents, most of whom bought in the area knowing that the tracks were there but who then lobbied councils about the noise. I’d better not go too far down that track.
Today I’d like to look at three more circuits which are no longer available for motorcycle road racing and try to tell the story about them as well. In only one of the cases is the circumstance like Amaroo and Oran but the end result is the same.
Living in Sydney/Wollongong in the 70’s meant that you didn’t have to travel far to see some racing. However, there was one occasion every year when you willingly travelled further; indeed, for many enthusiasts, their calendar went from Easter to Easter.
Bathurst and the iconic Mount Panorama that dominates the city, was the Mecca for motorcycle racing in NSW. Amaroo and Oran may have run title meetings and Swann Series, Chesterfield Superbike Series and even the Castrol Six Hour race, but only Bathurst mattered to the die-hard racer. I have written quite a long article on the subject of Bathurst before so I don’t intend to revisit the content. Instead I’d like to concentrate on the later years of Bathurst and see if I can determine why the track remains but is off-limits to motorcycle road racing.
Bathurst began its life as a bike racing track and continued, until bike racing ceased there in the mid-1990’s, to be the venue of which anyone who has competed there speaks most highly and reverently.
Even those who experienced the worst of what Bathurst could do to you, still wish that the could see the bikes back at Bathurst one more time. Unfortunately, motorcycle road racing has always been the poor relation of car racing when it comes to finance and the rising prominence of the October car race at Bathurst saw a corresponding decline in the financial viability of the Easter Carnival. The bottom line was simply that the 1000km race could garner excessively more money, column inches and TV hours than what the bikes ever could. Despite the pretensions of the big races at Bathurst being Grands Prix races, Easter was still a carnival and the races attracted disappointingly less sponsorship than the tin tops did.
In spite of this, competitors still flocked to the mountain and spectators paid their money to stand in often appalling conditions to watch the bikes go round. The race generated its own heroes, riders who are still spoken of in reverential terms for their exploits on the mountain. Some of the greatest races this country has ever seen took place there and our (small) collection of recorded motorcycle racing history is top-heavy with Bathurst tall tales and true.
Popular media would have us believe that the local residents hated the annual influx of motorcyclists who, according to legend, raped, plundered and pillaged while seeking every opportunity that they could find to terrify the locals, but it’s simply not true. There WERE a hard core of bikers who came to Bathurst to booze it up and be as obnoxious as they could be, but they WERE the 1% and their antics were almost totally restricted to the campgrounds on the top of the mountain, not the main streets of the city. Talk to any Bathurst residents who remember the time and they will tell you that the car racing crowds were usually responsible for far more vandalism and mayhem than the bikers were. If you think about it for a moment, the reason is obvious. You can carry way more booze in a car than you can carry on a bike.
Having said that, the escalating violence between the police and the bikers was a major factor in bringing about the demise of bike racing on the mountain. The police saw it as their responsibility to clamp down on drugs and excessive alcohol consumption and the bikers saw it as their responsibility to bait the police as much as they could. The 99% of the crowd was made up of motorcyclists and motorcycle racing enthusiasts and they didn’t want to have anything to do with EITHER of the opposing factions; they were just there to watch the racing.
But the stand-off eventually broke out into open warfare and the lurid newspaper and TV headlines made for great circulation figures but didn’t tell the real story (surprise, surprise) and they left the majority of Australians with the impression that ALL motorcyclists were latter-day Vikings and were to be avoided at all costs. Sponsors, wary of their reputations in the wider community, began to rethink their budgets and the few years of violence at the mountain probably contributed, more than any other single factor, to the eventual demise of bike racing on the mountain.
There were, of course, many other contributory factors most notably the increasingly motorcycle-UNFRIENDLY modifications to the track that were being made to suit the demands of the car racing fraternity and specifically those of the V8 touring car juggernaut. Bathurst had never been a motorcycle-friendly track in terms of safety; indeed increasing numbers of deaths and serious injuries compounded to hasten the track’s demise also, but turning the track into a ‘concrete tunnel’ as one racer described it to me, certainly made racing bikes there a less attractive proposition than what it had been. Reducing run-off areas was nonsense and it had its inevitable result.
There was one final attempt to revive the Easter Carnival in 2000 but, while the racing was excellent, the trade support good and the enthusiasm sort-of equating to the events in their glory days, in the end it cost vastly more money than it made and broken promises ended up costing the promoter his house, his business and his livelihood.
Today you can ride around the track (making sure you keep to the 60km/h speed limit) but you can’t race there any more nor will you ever be able to again. Talk of a smaller circuit, incorporating part of the ‘full’ track continues to appear from time to time but, as with attempts to build another circuit in the Sydney basin, it is unlikely for the same reasons.
In some ways I miss Bathurst more than I miss Oran and Amaroo. Yes, the races were only for one weekend in the year, but they somehow seemed to cram as much excitement into one weekend as many weekends of racing at the short tracks did. I feel privileged that I was able to see the races during the great era of racing there and I know that nothing else will ever replace it, and, I think that’s probably the way it’s best to leave it.
And, you see, I’m already over 1000 words so I’ll have to leave the other two tracks to next time.
Oh, and as it’s the 1st of January, a Happy New Year to all my readers. I hope 2016 brings you the fulfillment of your hopes and dreams.
sesblocker says
Great blog Phil!
I was a marshal at the last Australian GP at Bathurst in 1988. I also attended many Easter GPs before that and recall the problems (media would call “riots”) at the top of the Mount. I observed that these would happen every two years and varied by the number of police present. I won’t comment on my theory other than both sides would antagonise each other to boiling point on the Saturday night. One year, racing on Sunday was delayed because “Skyline” had to be hand-swept to clear the track of broken glass.
One of the perks of “marshalling” at Bathurst was that of “traveling marshals” (TM) circulating around the track during races, off the racing line, on some very nice “rides”, DB1, YB5,
One of the worst “perks” of a TM was being first on scene of some horrendous accidents.
I was very disappointed when the AGP moved to PI.
Phil Hall says
Wow, I didn’t know that. Travelling Marshall was so much fun, I didn’t realise that you did that. Bathurst was SO special. I feel privileged to have seen it in the glory days. Thanks, mate.