Steve Parrish
Hello all! No doubt you’ll hate me for this, but I was on my way to the airport just as the snow began to fall in Blighty, so I escaped all the chaos! I’m writing to you from the Sheene household in Australia, but first off I had a stop in New Zealand.
It was to visit a race track called Hampton Downs, which has had some money spent on it, been extended and also enjoys a new pit complex. It even has a corner named ‘Double Bastard Corner’! It was bought by a fella called Tony Quinn, as Aussie who made a load of cash from pet food, as he worked out he could feed kangaroo meat to pets. As they’re considered a pest and there are lots of them, he ended up with a bucket of dosh. He loves motorsport and this is actually the second track he owns.
There was a round of the New Zealand Superbike series on, which was actually hotly contested, and they had an old duffer race squeezed in. it was me and people like Randy Mamola, Kevin Magee, Graeme Crosby and a few more bombing around on old two-strokes. I actually finished second, but it was a bit of a demo race, although I did set a new lap record there in a bus!
We were at a dinner on the Saturday night and I was showing a bit of my double-decker bus antics from the past to the diners. This Tony Quinn told me to leave it with him, and come Sunday morning there was a bus waiting for me! We had a whole bunch on the bus, including Jeremy Burgess who was my crew chief for the weekend, though there were a few we had to nigh on force on! Anyway, a new bus lap record is good enough for me.
We used to race WSB in New Zealand, in fact my rider Terry Rymer won a race there back in the day. We raced there for a number of years, but although Hampton Downs is now long enough and set up well enough to hold something like that, the issue with NZ is there’s barely anyone there, something like five million people spread across an island the size of Blighty. I’m sure Mr Quinn would love to do it, if they can get the crowds, money and extra backing to do so, and convince Dorna of course!
After that I spent some time up at Crosby’s place, and spent a few days helping him check our Kawasaki Z900s and 1000s. He strips them all down, rebuilds them with fresh p arts and you end up with a mint classic. I even helped him doing some drilling, welding, milling and worked on some electric looms, so there’s a bit of Parrish in some of those bikes that will end up with happy customers. I may advise Crosby to supply a fire extinguisher for the one whose electrics I worked on mind you!
And then it was over to here in Australia and to the Sheene place, waiting for the Barry Sheene Festival on next week at Eastern Creek. Sorry, it’s now called Sydney Motorsports Park, or something, but to me it’ll always be EC. Anyway, it’ll be a great event again with fabulous classic and modern race bikes, which all the usual faces turn up to.
And of course, this coming weekend is the start of MotoGP. I spent some time with someone recently who works in the Yamaha squad, and even they think it’s probably down to Marquez and Dovizioso given their winter testing results. They also said how it seems that Vinales is a bit fragile, being amazing one minute and terrible the next; he can be all over the place mentally. In fact I think I saw even Rossi basically telling him during testing to just get on with it! In fact, it smacks a little bit of Lorenzo doesn’t it? You can’t win titles with a rinsed head, but I’m sure he can at least win races again.
I enjoyed WSB from PI too, though I’m still not sure about the rules. How important must gearing now be, given that rev ranges are shorter? And there will more rev drops if results go a certain way, and if the race bikes end up revving lower than a road bike, that will be extraordinary, and a little daft. Worse still is every single rider of whatever bike being penalised if it happens. It’s a bit convoluted for me, really. I enjoyed the pit-stop, the same way I do when it rains in WSB or MotoGP. Could it be an addition to WSB? Maybe, but let’s see how this year goes before we make that verdict. The one plus is Jonny Rea not coming away with two wins, though it’s not a plus for him, obviously! Till next month!