Twin peaks
Bathurst mirrored major motorcycle trends throughout the Seventies and Eighties and nowhere is this more obvious than in the number of Ducati specials that raced on The Mountain in the mid-1980s. Battle of the Twins was becoming a worldwide alternative class to the racing establishment, even running as a support event to the Daytona 200 race in the US. Australian tuners joined the fray and a squadron of Ducati TT racers turned up to Bathurst in 1984. Among them were Ron Young, Ian Gowanloch and his right-hand wrench Arthur Davis, with riders Chris Oldfield and Pete Muir. Other riders on TT2 Ducatis included Graeme Morris and Lindsay Mckay. These little machines had earned the reputation of being the equivalent of a four-stroke GP bike. Their sound and performance excited fans but frustrated the main players on factory machinery. Bob Brown and rider Kevin Magee took the TT2 racer to a new level with an F1 750cc Ducati that was eventually bored and stroked to 851cc. Magee was running fifth in the 1985 Arai 500 until the bolts sheared on his rear sprocket. The next year, two ultimate versions of the air-cooled Ducati racer appeared; the Montjuich and the DB1 Bimota. Ducati importer Frasers had enough clout with the factory to give the Montjuich an unheralded world debut at the Sydney Motorcycle Show. Then the pre-production prototype, stamped with the number 001, was raced at Bathurst by seasoned campaigner Pete Byers. Meanwhile, Gowanloch and Oldfield were developing a potent version of Bimota’s DB1. With help from tuner Pete Smith, the DB1 was eventually bored and stroked from 750cc to 985cc, where it made 100bhp. It soon became a crowd favourite, but getting it to hold together for the length of the Arai 500 was a challenge.