‘Dahn under, cobba’
Classic racing in the southern hemisphere is booming. Our Hamish Cooper reviews the three biggest meetings on the calendar.
A review of the classic scene in the southern hemisphere by Classic Racer’s Hamish Cooper. Lots of action and some huge events keep the fans happy and the racing furiously close.
Australia’s annual Broadford Bonanza focused on the 90th anniversary of Vincent and included a tribute to both the Crump speedway dynasty and its link to innovative speedway tuner Neil Street. Easter is a time of hope, resurrection and celebration, even for motorcyclists. Broadford this Easter showed the results of months of preparation by true enthusiasts. More than 70 Vincents were brought out from sheds, workshops and private collections for the road circuit. Over at the speedway venue a special moment was celebrated following the discovery and renovation of the famous Neil Street DOHC four-valve Jawa. There’s a no-bullshit atmosphere around speedway that survives the bulldust of a typical pit setting, as riders swarm around, pawing the ground with the rear wheels of their bikes ‘to get the feel’. Speedway is one of the original gladiatorial stadium spectacles. Timeless, it has survived over a century while retaining its basics of a single-cylinder engine, direct drive with no gearbox or engine electronics. Another constant is the ritual of setting up for a race. It was no different at this year’s Broadford Bonanza for the Crump speedway dynasty of grandfather Bob, his son Phil and grandson Jason. It was time to demonstrate Phil’s original Neil Street-ivan Tighe Jawa. And only Phil was going to do it. This out-of-the-box, crazy idea from down under rocked the speedway world in just a couple of months in 1975. Engineer Tighe combined with racer Street to convert a pushrod, two-valve Jawa to four valves and double overhead cams. Speedway technology would never get more sophisticated than this. Phil pushed his bike into life, then warmed the engine up with it leaned over on the sidestand with the rear wheel spinning. Speedway bikes don’t have a gearbox and you only want to use the clutch once in anger, for that all-important start. After the methanol-fuelled engine was warmed sufficiently, he pulled the bike upright, let out the clutch for a split second, then pulled it back in. As if on cue, other riders started doing the same and a dust cloud formed. It became one of those priceless moments. Aussie bulldust, mixed with methanol and Castrol R vegetable oil, and mixed with a no-bullshit attitude of ‘let’s get out there and win’. And win Phil did back in 1975. He took the completely untried design to an unexpected victory at the Aussie speedway title at the Sydney Showground. Six weeks later he repeated this effort. He rode it to a win in every race he entered at London’s Wimbledon speedway. Asked about his unexpected success it was revealed that it all came down to that first release of the clutch.
“I had the choice of a standard Jawa or the Street conversion,” he said at Broadford. “As soon as I dropped the clutch in a practice start I knew which bike I wanted to race.” Any thoughts of prototype reliability were drowned out of his consciousness by the fact that the DOHC four-valve design had increased the Jawa’s power from 45bhp to 58bhp. But there were other quickly discovered advantages over the old technology. “The torque delivery was amazing and it revved another 1000rpm over a standard Jawa,” Phil remembered. There must have been some downsides to all this new-found speed. “There was a lot of mechanical noise and a lot of moving parts not far away from my vital parts,” Phil said. The Street conversion involved a long chain driving two big cam wheels at the top of the engine. With no automatic chain tension system, it all relied on accurate engine assembly and precise alignment of parts. But the conversion was reliable enough for more than 200 to be made and raced for over four years. The Neil Street-ivan Tighe significance in speedway cannot be overstated. A couple of Aussie engineers, combined with the rider that at the time even four-times world speedway champion Kiwi Barry Briggs predicted would be as good as him, got the jump on the next era of the sport’s technology. Briggs would eventually market his “Briggo” four-valve conversion in a period when everyone involved with the sport was trying to get a technical advantage. Weslake also offered a four-valve pushrod engine, while Jawa upped the ante with its own DOHC four-valve design (eventually moving back to a SOHC design to reduce overall engine weight). Then came Godden and other boutique speedway engine makers. But the first two warriors on the frontline of this speedway war of technology there were Australia’s oldest competing rider-turned-tuner Neil Street, aged 44, with his protégé rider Phil Crump, aged 23. If you wanted to learn the alphabet of Vincents, Broadford was the place to be this Easter. All Series Vincents made, from A to D, were on display in both the roadrace and speedway venues. The famous English manufacturer, which has links to Australia via engineer Phil Irving, was driven by performance. Long after it stopped production, big Vincent V-twins were helping win Australian speedway sidecar titles. There were many experts on hand to explain but perhaps the man with the biggest cross-section of Vincents was Franc Trento. He had examples from the Series A, B and C on show, and apologised for not having one of his Series D with him. Surrounded by another 50 Vincents spanning three decades and probably worth around $3m in total, he gave a quick history lesson. Vincent built what was considered the world’s first Superbike in 1948, the 200km/h Series C Black Shadow. But back in the beginning the Series A was also a performer, with the single-cylinder Comet nudging 150km/h back in the early 1930s. “It’s an evolving story,” he said, of a company that pushed the boundaries of design while forging a place in motorcycle folklore. “Between 1946 and 1955 there were 11,134 Vincents, singles and twins, manufactured. While this makes them rare, the value of ones with history and that haven’t been over-restored has just been proved in a recent sale.” Trento was referring to the Bonhams’ auction that netted a world record $US929,000 for the ex-jack Ehret Black Lightning racer, bought by a Tasmanian salmon magnate. Trento actually owned it at one stage of its life. “In 1999 I spent $10,000 buying a new-oldstock seat for it out of the US,” he said. “That may sound like a lot of money but getting the correct seat was the key to finishing its recommissioning while keeping originality.” Among the Vincents on display were some true rarities. A Series A Tt-replica from the early 1930s was one of just 29 ever made. Just along from it was a Series B Black Shadow, one of just 77 produced and recognised by its girder forks. Most girderforked Vincents were Rapides, a slightly lower-spec model.
One of the most dog-eared-looking Vinnies was one of the most valuable. Dripping in original patina was a Black Lightning production racer nicknamed ‘The Blunderbus’. It made a bold contrast to a replica 1938 Rapide, built entirely in Australia from scratch. Only the ex-ariel Square Four Burman gearbox was bought in. One of the men involved in this, Neal Videan, had another intriguing Vincent on display. This was a Series C Black Shadow supercharged and turned into a drag bike by Bob Satterly in the 1960s. While the display bikes were a bit mindblowing, equally inspiring was the sight of over a dozen Vincents circulating on the roadrace circuit over the weekend.
Ivan Coyle, 1971 H-D “Halfster 500” dirt-track slider
“No, we haven’t cut up a perfectly good Seventies Sportster engine to do this,” said Ivan Coyle of his unusual dirt-track slider. “Lewis Mcewan (well-known Victorian H-D racing enthusiast) turned a blown-up Harley Sportster twin into a single by chopping the gearbox housing off and removing the rear cylinder and head. There are spacers on the crankpin to compensate for what’s missing.” Pre-evo Sportsters were notorious for their gearbox internals escaping through the engine’s unit casing if meticulous shimming wasn’t undertaken to avoid a terminal end-float. So a piece of scrap has been turned into a beautiful, if unlikely vintage racer that has won races in its class.
Graeme Brooker, Bob Brown, 680cc 8-valve Ducati Pantah
There was a sliver-thin envelope of eight-valve air-cooled Ducati technology in the mid-1980s before the factory produced its 851 liquidcooled Superbike prototype in 1987. Leading the charge of the belt-drive boffins were Australian Bob Brown and Kiwi Dallas Rankine. Their self-built, air-cooled, eight-valve Pantahs seemed to be the way forward. Brown, in particular, had plans to develop a kit that could be offered to privateer racers. But time overtook them as Ducati turned its prototype into a racer that could challenge liquid-cooled, four-cylinder Japanese bikes in the first year of World Superbikes. Brown’s original project has been revitalized by one of his long-term associates, Graeme Brooker. After acquiring vital parts from Steve Howell, who worked with Brown to bring a concept into reality, he has built up a Marktwo version of the original design. Along the way he dragged Brown back into the project. “It’s just two blokes mucking around in a shed,” he said of the previous few months preparing for the Bonanaza. Asked about turning away from air-cooled Ducati technology to embrace the new but initially fragile liquidcooled era of Superbikes, Brown was typically frank. “Don O’connor (New Zealand’s Ducati importer) once dropped into the pits to see how we were going with our 851,” he said. “I told him to get down on his knees because the view was better from there. He could see daylight from one side of the crankcases to the other. We all went through dozens of crankcases in the first year of World Superbikes, and they always seemed to crack in a different area.”
Quentin Cook, Paul Sens, 1964, 1971 Bultaco 250cc trails bikes
In among the wallaby grass and waist-high paddock weeds, newcomer trials rider Quentin Cook was having the time of his life with Paul Sens, who helped get trails back on the Bonanza programme after a call from Bonanza committee member Paul Wason. Cook and Sens were on immaculate Bultacos dating back to the start of that Spanish company’s world domination of the sport. Cook’s family has a long connection to Bultaco. His father David bought one of the first commercially produced Bultaco M10s in the 1960s. As a homage to that effort, Quentin’s recently restored 1964 M10 carries the original tax disc from January 1965 and the UK number plate GBL51C. Cost of registration in 1965? A staggering one pound sterling and 13 pence! Sens’ 1971 M49 Sherpat250 was a project in itself. He bought it on ebay, largely disassembled. Instead of waiting for it to be shipped over from Melbourne, he drove over to Adelaide after work, picked it up and returned to start another day of work. Trials might appear to be a slow form of motorsport but it has some very fast competitors at work keeping its history alive.
Ron Angel Collection
Classic racing identity Ron Angel dug into his vast collection of exotica to fill the top of the pits. Among them was one of the world’s rarest Grand Prix motorcycles, a 1969 Jawa V4 two-stroke. Although infamous as the bike that rising GP star Bill Ivy crashed and died on, it has links to Australia and New Zealand. Both Jack Findlay and Ginger Molloy raced one of these sophisticated 350s in an era largely dominated by MV Agusta. Among other eye candy on display were GP racers from MBA, Bimota, WE and Saxon.