When I first started following and photographing road racing this was a commonplace occurrence. This photo, from Amaroo Park, August 1976, shows two of our greatest gladiators, both now, sadly, no longer with us, performing for the crowd while racing in the Unlimited event. As I recall, Gregg won this particular stoush as he mostly did, stalking Warren and letting him do most of the work before scooting past under brakes near the end of the race to take the chequered flag first.
But these two, and Gregg’s TKA team-mate, specialised in this sort of motorcycle madness at every track they visited. The narrow power band of the peaky 750cc two stroke engines meant that lifting the front wheel could be done relatively easily. The top riders soon showed that it wasn’t too difficult but also showed that holding the front wheel in the air for extended periods of time was possible if one exercised a careful grip on the throttle and kept the right foot a judicious distance from the rear brake pedal.
Yes, it was show-boating of the most outrageous kind but the crowds loved it and the media lapped it up. At one stage the late Bill Meyer, photographer extraordinaire, got together with the TKA crew at Oran Park and, as well as shooting some exquisite publicity stills, captured some amazing wheelstand shots with Gregg and Murray wheelstanding down the whole length of Oran Park’s main straight.
Now doing this for publicity was one thing, but doing it while you were racing? No problem. The TKA riders and Warren Willing rode machines that were so technically superior to those of their opponents that they had time to carry on like this during the races as well.
Now, an aside note that relates to the shot at the top of the article. Amaroo was a tricky little track, just 1.9kms round (like running a marathon around your clothes line, as Dick Johnson once remarked). The track was in a little valley and was hedged-in with earth banks and concrete walls. Run-off areas? What are they? Of all of the track’s tricky corners, Stop Corner, as it was named, was the trickiest. A 90 degree right-hander at the end of short straight, it was the favourite out-braking spot on the track. It was also the corner where many, many, riders came to grief and it wasn’t just because of poor tyre technology.
You see, the road on the exit from Stop Corner was cambered. There was a pronounced crown in the middle of the track and, while entering the corner was not that difficult, exiting it was. If you took the classic racing line, start out wide on the left, clip the apex and let the bike drift out to the left on the exit, you reduced the chance of being out-braked. But it also meant that you slipped OVER the crown of the track and started heading out to the unforgiving concrete wall that was JUST there at the very edge of the track.
Realising that that was happening meant that you dropped the throttle for just a second. But, once you realised that you weren’t going to HIT the wall and that the guy behind you was uncomfortably close, the tendency was to give the bike a big handful of power to keep the speed up and avoid being passed. BUT, you were still on the down-side of the camber and a high-side was now much more likely, especially if you were riding a finicky two stroke with a narrow power band like a TZ350, for example.
The number of accidents that were carbon copies of this scenario was huge. I saw dozens of them. The answer was, I’ve been told, don’t start accelerating till the bike was nearly upright and the camber of the track had disappeared and you were on a flat surface again. Sounds simple, eh? It wasn’t and, for many riders, Stop Corner remained their “bogey” corner at Amaroo Park.
Warren and Gregg are seen in the picture above, exiting Stop Corner and the bikes are upright as they accelerated hard towards the last corner that led onto the main straight. A myriad of races were lost and won in this little short section.
Having set the template for performing wheelstands on the track almost at will, Gregg, Murray and Warren were followed by the even more outrageous Graeme Crosby who specialised in doing the same thing but, even more remarkably on what was basically a hotted-up road bike. The famous photo of Graeme wheelstanding DOWN The Dipper at Bathurst, has gone into the lexicon. If you’ve ever done a lap of Bathurst, even at legal speeds, you will know how frightening the Dipper is.
But the day of the wheelstand was coming to an end. That’s not to say that many riders didn’t do it, it’s just that race officials started to frown upon it and a rider exercising the freedom was most likely to be asked, once the race was over, to go to the Chief Steward’s office for a bit of a ticking-off, “We don’t encourage that sort of behaviour….bad example to the younger riders…etc, etc.” Merv Rixon was especially tough and Jan Blizzard, in her capacity of Race Secretary, also took an active role in discouraging the practice.
These days, wheelstands are much rarer than they were in the great days of Willing, Sayle, Hansford and Crosby. Wayne Gardner escaped the net and went to England where he terrorised the locals on the Moriwaki Kawasaki and the Honda GB CB1000R, saving front tyre wear wherever he could.
Of course, the most annoying part about the crack-down on wheelies is that modern bikes make them so much easier, but you’ll get into trouble if you do it during the races. There simply isn’t any justice in the world, is there?
