THE DAY THE WORLD CHANGED

No-one takes much notice of the rider in the slightly baggy black leathers setting up on the second row of the Production race grid. Everyone’s eyes are on Ken Blake, Peter Jones and Jeff Curley, the hotshot racers at the Preston Motorcycle Club’s Harvey Wiltshire Memorial meeting. It hasn’t been a great day so far for Peggy Hyde, who is making her eagerly awaited debut as a Bgrade rider. Her T20 Suzuki has failed to start for the earlier Junior Class races so how will Hyde go on her H1 Kawasaki 500? This evil-handling motorcycle with a razor-thin power band has already gained nicknames of ‘The Widow maker’ and ‘A man’s bike’ among both road riders and racers. The track is also greasy from drizzle and an earlier go-kart meeting. Talent alone will win this as the Production race means Hyde’s on equal footing with A-graders Blake (Kawasaki), Jones (Suzuki) and Curley (Triumph). The flag drops and the usual suspects bolt into the distance. Hyde has a slow start; then something amazing happens. She has overtaken Blake under brakes at the end of the main straight and is catching Jones. The race report in the May 1 edition of Australian Motor Cycle News takes up the story: “Lap two she took the lead from Jones and then trying to save face for the male sex he slid off on the third lap to retire. From then on Hyde had two seconds at all times from Blake, who made a desperate attempt on the last lap to regain male honour but he went down too, coming off at Shell Corner!” Attitudes to the role of women in sport and life were different in 1970. Very different.

Four decades on Peggy Hyde still remembers the adulation she received after what she considers to be her most telling race win. “After getting the chequered flag I raced on for another lap as I’d been shown the flag a lap too early in another race,” she recalls. “I wanted to ride back to my pit area but the crowd was in the way, patting me on the back. Then I got hit on the back so hard I was coughing. It was Jeff Curley laughing and yelling at me: ‘They all fell off! They all fell off!’ “I never made brilliant starts and I’d come through from seventh to win, dropping the lap record by two seconds. It put me on equal terms with the top riders.” Hyde doesn’t have vivid recollections of her passing moves. “I think I did my overtaking at the end of the main straight,” she says. “There was something about that corner and the next one. At a later meeting after watching me ride, Giacomo Agostini sought my agreement that those two turns were really one. That was a nice moment of recognition.” (In 1971 Ago raced his MV at Calder as part of an Australian tour). Hyde remembers glancing behind at the end of the main straight, on the second-last lap, to see Blake just entering it. She slowed enough for him to catch up, but he was unable to get past and fell off trying. “He was the official Kawasaki rider and he really should have stayed on to give Kawasaki a one-two result,” she says. Her racing notebook of the period makes the following observations: Production race. Best lap 55 secs. Record. Harvey Wiltshire race. Best lap 54 secs. 7th place. “Although a wet track is nerve-racking, I had the advantage of daily riding in the rain, commuting in Melbourne as well as the 100km or so a day I covered as a courier rider around the city,” Peggy says. “So I had a useful degree of confidence in the wet and did relatively well in it.” The victory got a glowing report in Australia’s major motorcycle magazines but it was nothing compared with her earlier win as a lowly C-grader at Phillip Island in January that year. Melbourne’s Herald, a broadsheet newspaper aimed at the commuter market, splashed a large photograph of Hyde on its front page with the heading “She beat 90 men”.the story continued on an inside page with the heading: “Brown-eyed blonde beats 90 men”. The story read: “Mrs Peggy Hyde, 26, rides her 500cc, three-cylinder Kawasaki motorcycle to work today. She rode the same bike to victory in the Senior C-grade race at Phillip Island last Saturday. She beat 90 men over five, three-mile laps. The prize: $15.” What the story didn’t say was that it was the first win by a female anywhere in the world in an Open road race. These days we take women’s participation in motorcycle racing for granted. But in 1970, Hyde and a handful of fellow women motorcycle racers lived in a different world. A 1972 yearbook of motorcycle racing devoted a page to Hyde in her new white leathers sitting on her Yamaha TR2. The words read: “Probably Australia’s best-known road racer, through the publicity she has received in the press, Peggy Hyde is the first woman in the world to win total acceptance in what had been ‘a man’s game’. Acting as her own mechanic, she proved she could keep up with – and beat – the men on equal terms.” By now Hyde was a regular at meetings all around Australia, and a regular in the annual Castrol Six Hour event.

“THIS EVIL-HANDLING MOTORCYCLE WITH A RAZOR-THIN POWER BAND HAS ALREADY GAINED THE NICKNAME OF ‘THE WIDOW MAKER’.”