New bikes at Bathurst
Recently two very iconic racing sidecars arrived at the National Motor Racing Museum at Bathurst.
Mal Mapperson, from the tiny town of Premer in western NSW, was a gun sidecar rider on both tar and dirt until his career was sadly interrupted by a serious accident involving a chain saw. Mal successfully raced his tiny outfit in basically the same form on the dirt tracks in his area of Tamworth, Gunnedah and Inverell, as well as occasional trips further afield, and with little more than a change of tyres at Bathurst in the annual Easter races.
In 1967, riding the Triumph-powered dirt track outfit, he scored second place in the Unlimited Sidecar TT in a crash-strewn race won by Dennis Skinner’s Vincent. This was the same machine on which Mal had won the 1966 Australian Dirt Track Championships at Taree, Newcastle. The Triumph engine eventually gave way to a Kawasaki triple, and later Mal built an entirely new outfit, also H2 Kawasaki-powered, especially for road racing.
For many years the Mapperson outfits were displayed at a museum in Gunnedah, but have now found a new home at Bathurst, where Mal turned in some exceptional performances. n