Table of contents for Issue 319 in Motorcycle Trader

The only man to win world championships on two and four wheels has died at the age of 83. John Surtees was admitted to St Georges Hospital, London, in February with an existing respiratory condition and, after a short period in intensive care, he passed away peacefully on March 10. His wife, Jane, and daughters, Leonora and Edwina were by his side, according to a family statement. During his motorcycle racing career, Surtees recorded 38 Grand Prix victories from 51 races, winning four 500cc world titles in 1956, 1958, 1959 and 1960, with the MV Agusta factory team while claiming the 350cc crown from 1958-1960. During that period, he also won six Isle of Man TTs, becoming the first rider to win three in a row. “The Isle of Man…

“I’d lapped as fast as I ever had on a standard 40 sportsbike” BI-DIRECTIONAL QUICKSHIFTER The quickshifter (GSX-R1000R only) interrupts power delivery – for between 50 and 75 milliseconds – to allow a clean upshift. It opens the EFI’s throttle valves just enough to increase rpm and match engine speed to the next-lower gear ratio, for quicker and smoother downshifts without manually blipping the throttle. BIG BRAINS The engine’s ECU has a 32-bit dual processor that reads the reads throttle position, crankshaft position, rpm, gear position, and front and rear wheel speed. It also works with the six-direction, three-axis inertia measuring system (IMU). VARIABLE VALVE TIMING (VVT) The centrifugally operated system is built into the intake cam sprocket and an adjacent guide plate, using 12 steel balls and slanted grooves…

I picked up a wrecked DJP sidecar for $200. The chassis was bent and rusted, but the body, windscreen and seat were saveable. For the next six months, I designed and fabricated a stronger chassis, complete with jerry can mount and toolbox, then repaired the body. Having access to a fully equipped engineering workshop was handy, so custom mounting brackets were made for the Suzuki GSX-1100. Back in my garage, I aligned the outfit to suit the open roads of Western Australia. The final addition: a second-hand Vetter Windjammer fairing. After a couple of laps around the suburbs, I was satisfied with the outfit’s handling. This rig was powerful, fast and very comfortable. Importantly, nothing had fallen off. So, grabbing warm riding gear, a bottle of Stones Green Ginger Wine…

Cook looks back on that day with a huge sense of satisfaction. “The field was full of great Superbike riders –Reg Pridmore, Mike Baldwin, David Emde (below left), Wes Cooley (right) a bunch of others,” he says. “Of course, this makes you worry, especially fronting up to guys with factory-affiliated bikes. Phil had friends at Ducati, but we weren’t able to secure any fancy racing parts from them.” He then looks at the other side of the coin. “We had what was acknowledged to be the fastest Ducati on the planet,” he says. “It was only 3mph slower than the Yoshi Kawasaki through the speed trap and there were no other bikes in the field that were even close. There were bikes that went fast and bikes that handled and…

Just when you think MT can’t get any better, we introduce a new service. Regular readers will know I whinge from time to time about the number and nature of recalls on new bikes. Competition, the pace of development and the triumph of marketing over engineering means more and more new bikes with design flaws make it onto showroom floors. Development of new models seems now to include the consumer as an active part of the process – sell the bike, see what goes wrong with it in the first 12 months and fix it for the model update. Lack of endurance testing and the compartmentalised nature of design are combining to create problems that only emerge when the bike is actually being used regularly on the road. The current…

We’ve all heard the acronym KISS – “keep it simple, stupid”. It’s based on the idea that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated. Most of us agree it’s a sound principle. But if we’re honest, we’ll also admit we don’t always apply it. For example, when I decided the brakes on MT’s runabout, the VTR 1000F Firestorm, were too soft, I instantly decided the solution was a complete upgrade: new calipers, new levers, new discs and new lines. “How great would four-piston Brembos look on a VTR?” I thought. “It doesn’t matter that it’s a 1998 banger or that it’s not even mine.” Stopping is important. And even if it weren’t, I’d still find a way to convince myself the upgrades are justified.…

NEW SOUTH WALES THE RALLYMAN Motorcycles, mountains and music. Free entry, free camping and firewood. Live music Saturday. Food and alcohol on site. Rally badges $10. All motorcyclists welcome. Where: Old saw mill site, 3154 Summerland Way, Grevillia, NSW, 30km north of Kyogle. Contact Kog on 0456 690 145 ROYAL ENFIELD CLUB OF AUSTRALIA INC. Meetings first Tuesday of the month at Public House Petersham in Sydney, 7.30pm. The NSW club aims to promote the preservation and restoration of historic Royal Enfield motorcycles. Membership of the Royal Enfield Club of Australia covers the cost of the NSW club. Contact Peter Jackson on 0466 233 781. Rally: Queanbeyan Rally, May 7 to 9. Contact Garry Eyles 0400405158 POLISH MOTORCYCLE SOCIAL GROUP, SYDNEY All types of bikes welcome. No attitudes. Just social…

Harley-Davidson will finally import the 750cc version of its top-selling Street 500 learner bike, but the model bound for Australia and New Zealand will feature more performance, sharper handling and added aggression for younger, urban riders. It will bring the Street Rod name back to the old in May with a rideaway price of $12,995, but the new model bears no relation to its unloved V-Rod namesake from 2005, apart from the fact both bikes are liquid-cooled. Instead, the latest Street Rod shares its underpinnings with the XG750R flat-track racer the company is putting up against a purpose-built Indian Scout racer in the American Flat Track series. The Street Rod is powered by a liquid-cooled 750cc 60-degree ‘Revolution X’ V-twin with single-overhead cams, which is said to produce 20 per…

It might be so much fun you don’t remember it. This year’s Rallyman event – to be held at Grevillia, NSW, from June 9-12 – is expecting a record crowd of about 1500. But when we asked rally legend and Rallyman organiser ‘Kog’ Godfrey what happened at last year’s event, attended by about 1300, his memory was a bit hazy. “Um. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head,” he laughed. “There’s so much sort of happening.” The Rallyman started almost two decades ago and is now a liquor-licenced event all about motorcycles, mountains and music, with live music on Saturday, food and drinks on site, and Rallyman badges for $10. But most importantly, Kog says, it’s about freedom. “It’s a nice relaxing sort of weekend,” he…

In just 10 laps I knew Suzuki had nailed what we all want: power. Nothing gets your adrenaline pumping like 200hp (148.6kW) in a light chassis. But the big questions remained: did the sixth-generation GSXR1000 have the brains to match its brawn, and would it be up to scratch after an eight-year gap between models? Like Gixxer fans across the globe, I had my doubts. The mighty GSX-R1000 race bike once owned the track, and has the trophy cabinet to prove it. But in recent times, the road bike has fallen well behind the pack. While the likes of Aprilia and BMW have paved the way in modern performance, electronics and safety, the GSX-R1000, last updated five years ago, has come to resemble something from the stone age. Don’t get…

“At each end, riders had to negotiate a tricky 180-degree hairpin turn, going back and forth for four laps” “It’s the next best thing to sex,” Leonard ‘Bluey’ Hillman, 84, told the pretty TV news reporter with a satisfied grin. He might be much older than the 1949 BSA single he was racing, but Bluey was raring to go for the long-awaited return of Sellicks Beach Historic Races. And, despite the wet and windy conditions, the race meet was on for young and old. Sixty-four years have passed since Bluey and hundreds of other motorcycle maniacs raced the mile-long stretch between Adelaide’s Silver Sands and Sellicks Beach. Between 1913 and 1953, beach racing was a glamour event in South Australia. It was typically held over the Australia Day weekend, but…

SPANNER: When you say, “my best crash”, are you referring to the one I was most lucky to walk away from or the one that amused the spectators most? ROOTHY: Knowing you, mate, I reckon we’d better hear both. SPANNER: I think I hold some kind of world record: I had two major crashes within eight minutes of each other. It was in 1972 on a Yamaha YR1 350. I was riding home from teaching at a school in Sydney. I was wearing the classic teacher clobber: corduroy pants, desert boots, a polo-neck jumper and one of those jackets with leather patches on the elbows. It was a bit wet, so I was holding the bike to about 60km/h through the sweepers when the bike suddenly exited the scene and…

If you’ve known Rex Wolfenden for a while you’d probably describe him as a fairly placid bloke. Articulate, knows his own mind and not easily rattled. But there’s clearly some steel in his character – there has to be given the number of races and championships he’s won over the years both as a rider and engineer cum team manager. Owner, operator, chief cook and proverbial bottle washer at T-Rex Racing Developments, he’s built what began as a hobby developing and riding post-classic race bikes into a business with an enviable international reputation. We’re not talking a grand enterprise, though the immaculate workshop is impressive, as there only ever seems to be Rex working there, nutting out what he has to do to get more speed out of whichever mechanical…

1947 TRIUMPH GRAND PRIX SOLD: $US25,000 ($32,620) An engine that generates electricity may seem a long way from this Triumph racer, but the two are closely connected. During World War II, the UK’s Royal Air Force needed a compact, portable, lightweight generator. So Triumph’s engineers took an existing engine – the Speed Twin – and adapted it. To reduce weight, the cylinder heads and barrels on the air-cooled 500cc parallel twin were cast from aluminium. An external fan was added to the generator housing to circulate air over the engine’s cooling fins. The resulting machine was used to power equipment in Lancaster bombers and was also parachuted to British troops on the ground. In post-war Britain, when just about everything was in short supply, Triumph’s thrifty engineers dusted off the…

United States President Donald Trump’s push to reduce tariffs for Harley-Davidson exports to Asia could lower prices in Australia. But don’t hold your breath. In an address to Congress, Trump complained that trade barriers made it hard for H-D to do business in Asia where he said it faced tariffs of up to 100 per cent. “They told me – without even complaining, because they have been mistreated for so long, that they have become used to it – that it is very hard to do business with other countries because they tax our goods at such a high rate,” he said. “They weren’t even asking for change. But I am.” A global H-D spokesperson told Motorcycle Trader a reduction in tariffs in Asia could have a knock-on effect for…

“I told the scrutineer that I would protest if the Hondas were not scrutineered” Excuse the gushing, but my favourite bikes of all time are Ducati’s TT2 and the bevel NCR racers campaigned from 1976 to 1980. So to be invited to dinner with the man who is arguably their most successful race engineer was like sucking nectar with the gods. Patrick Slinn was not only part of Sports Motorcycles, the British Ducati dealership team that took Mike Hailwood to his famous ‘comeback’ 1978 IoM TT F1 victory. But Slinn also helped win four consecutive F2 world championships with Tony Rutter between 1981 and 1984 and, as a rider, even competed against and shared a hot shower with Steve McQueen (don’t ask). Recognising his special place in Ducati’s racing…

GRASS IS GREENER Oi, Spannerman. Sorry, Grant. I’m proudly flying the motorcycle flag in Armidale, NSW, as you requested. I was born, bred, lived and worked in Melbourne up until two years ago. In fact, I lived in the same suburb as Guy Allen and worked for years in the same suburb as the mighty Motorcycle Trader. I woke one morning thinking, “I refuse to live the rest of my life looking out at my neighbour’s driveway every day.” So I moved away from everything I knew and ended up in Armidale. Charris, you can stick Warrigal Road, the Monash Freeway and Nepean Highway, Melbourne, in the ‘do you seriously call that riding?’ department. I was riding them before you were born, brother, and they suck. It’s a long story…

Daytona, March 11, 1977. The moment of truth. Cook Neilson is sitting on the front row of the grid for the 13-lap Superbike race. Around him are more than 30 bikes, including the winning BMWs of the previous year, highly-tuned Kawasaki fours, Laverdas, several Ducatis, a Honda and a Kawasaki. The first three rows are packed with America’s top riders on factory-supported machines. Cook has earned his place on the front row. All week his Ducati has held a two-second advantage over the field. But now the rider, having come third the year before, has mixed feelings as he looks around at his rivals. “It seemed that the day ought to belong to us,” he recalls 40 years after the giant-killing results he and his tuner friend Phil Schilling achieved…

“There was no halfway house when it came to the Katana” Style wasn’t a big deal in motorcycle design until the mid-1970s. Form followed function and, apart from a few factory café racers, all street motorcycles followed a generic path. This generally involved an upright riding position and dual seat, much like many of today’s naked bikes. Things changed in 1979 when Suzuki selected German company Target Design to draw up its Katana. Heading the company was none other than Hans Muth, who BMW had hired to oversee design of its R90S, paving the way for a new era of styling. Muth and fellow directors Hans-Georg Kasten and Jan Olof Fellström presented Suzuki with a space-age look created through wind-tunnel testing. The rider and motorcycle had been incorporated as a…

SAINTLY T-SHIRTS Fancy a fancy t-shirt? No? What’s the point? We only wear them to hide how unnecessary our nipples look, right? We hear you. But Saint’s shirts do seem to try a bit harder than most. First, they’re 100 per cent fine-spun cotton, so they should feel lovely as they glide over your mammary glands. Second, Saint says they’re ‘slimming’, which probably isn’t a bad thing. Third, they are designed and tested in Australia to ensure quality, Saint says. But, perhaps best of all, you can now try them on next time you’re in Melbourne. Until recently, Saint had been an online-based store. But, it says, increasing demand, locally and internationally, has prompted its first bricks-and-mortar store, at 154 Johnston Street, Fitzroy. As well as shirts, the flagship store…

NB: This list of Learner Approved Motorcycle Scheme (LAMS) bikes excludes most scooters, trailbikes and enduros. All prices are Manufacturer List Prices (MLP) and exclude dealer and statutory charges. The LAMS system operates in all Australian states and territories, but legislation varies from state to state – check with your dealer to ensure a model complies with your local LAMS regulations.…