Instead of riding all the way to Victoria from Perth for The World Superbikes in 1999, I elected instead to fly to Sydney and join in on a Bikescape tour to Phillip Island. I had seen the tour advertised in ‘Australian Motorcycle News’, then inquired as to the details/costs etc. and I was of the opinion that it represented pretty good value. $2500 for 10 days motorcycle hire (VFR 750), all fuel, accommodation, meals, ticket to the Supers etc. So all I had to put my hand in my pocket for was beer which suited me fine. I had scored business class flights by using my frequent flyer points so their was no expense to be incurred there which made it even more attractive.

I flew out on the Tuesday night, April 13, from Perth on a QANTAS 737 and had drank the plane out of Cointreau by the VIC/SA border. After getting off the plane I caught a cab and headed out to Peter Seymours’ place in Carlingford, I had met Pete via the Honda vfr-list email only prior to my trip and he had kindly offered me a place to stay for the night prior to the trip departure. So we had many beers and a great meal cooked by his talented wife, then talked the normal dribble about bikes/cars etc.

Pete dropped me off at Bikescape on the Wednesday morning where I met the Bikescape boys for the first time, Jim and Andy. My Hire VFR was prepped/fuelled and ready to go complete with a not very old 205 Sportmax on the rear and a brand new Yishenko front tyre, I was a bit sceptical about pushing a front tyre that I was not used to, but I found it not too bad as a whole when we got out into the twisties. Jim was staying in Sydney at the office before flying down to meet up with us at Phillip Island on the Saturday and take over from Andy there. The run-down of participants on the ride down to PI was as follows.

Stuart on a new VTR 1000 Honda V-Twin
Gary on a new Ducati 750 SS
Andy on the Bikescape ST1100 Honda
Rich from the US on the Bikescape Yamaha XJ 900 Diversion
Jeff from the US on the Bikescape Kawasaki ZZR 600
and myself on the Bikescape VFR 750 Honda.

We left about 9 AM as arranged and headed out to Macquarie Pass where we were greeted by some of the tightest roads I have ever ridden, there was only about 50-150 yards of straight before each 20 kph signposted 180 degree switchback corner, with a camber change just after the apex thrown in for good measure. Fun with a capital F. Andy was playing ‘tail-end Charlie’ for most of this leg on the ST11 while Stuart, who had ridden the route many times, was leader of the pack. Stuart decided to have a bit of fun through these tight twisties and I decided to go with him and find out how good this Yishenko front tyre was. I was keeping up with Stuart through here but only just, I still didn’t trust the front entirely and I was having to keep the VFR spinning hard to prevent falling behind the grunty VTR on the exit of the tighter stuff, I had to spin the rear on the exits while listening with jealousy to the thumping beats of the sticky 207 Dunlop shod VTR, pulling out of the turns with what seemed like effortless ease. I couldn’t out do him on the bends without getting a bit too loose for comfort on this unfamiliar bike and tyres, so I out-done him in the pose stakes by pulling monos out of some of the bends. This was to lead to my tour nickname of ‘The Wheelie King’. We had a quick stop for lunch followed by a jaunt out to the Kings Highway which snaked us back over the Great Dividing Range to the coast at Batemans Bay. The Princes Highway then took us the final 100 kilometres out to our first overnight stop, Central Tilba, where we stayed in a nice B&B hosted by a lovely couple, Ken, Linda and their family.

Thursday morning took us through lush Bega country over to Brown Mountain before taking the Cann Valley Highway into Victoria. Lunch was had at Bombala followed by a ride through a few National Parks in the remote East Gippsland region of Victoria. We left the highway at Nowa Nowa and followed a twisty route out to Buchan Caves, high in the Victorian hills, where we stayed the night. We had dinner at the pub and the accommodation was had in self contained units with three to each. It was a pretty cool night so we got a few take-away’s from the pub and started a bit of a fire outside the units for a bit of warmth.

On Friday morning half the group went out for a tour inside Buchan Caves while the other three of us took the road out of Buchan before heading for a fang out to Omeo and back along the same route to meet up with the rest of the tour group. Some pretty hard riding was undertaken along this great stretch of road which had apparently been voted one of the best motorcycling roads in Australia. We then traversed the Gippsland Lakes region before having lunch in Sale. After lunch we crossed the Strzelecki Ranges, via Mirboo North and Cape Paterson, then stuck to twisty roads nearly all the way to Phillip Island. Before we had even got off the bikes on the main street of Cowes we were greeted by a Suzuki TL1000S heading towards us on the back wheel, he then flipped it right over, I had to dodge the resulting carnage from the landing, a funny start to the weekend and a forewarning of more hilarious stupidity that was to come for the rest of the weekend. We then headed out to our accommodation for the weekend, which was a rented house about 1.5 kilometres walk from the pub in Cowes and party central.

After dropping our gear off at the house we headed back down to the road outside the pub to have some Steak Sangers’ for dinner followed by way too much beer. More hilarious antics were provided by other visitors to the Island in the way of burnouts, monos etc. There is a very large light pole outside the pub that shines the whole area, I would guess this pole would be about 24 inches in diameter at the base before tapering in to about 12 inches diameter at its 60-70 feet peak. Now this pole is greased heavily before the weekend to try and prevent the obvious. But sure enough by about 7 PM people were trying to shimmy their way to the top, with quite a few succeeding to my surprise, this was to continue all weekend.

Saturday morning saw me a bit seedy but I still made it out to the track by 8:30 AM. I visited the World Superbike Expo and bought myself a pair of ‘Draggin Jeans’, some framed Doohan prints and checked out the new bikes on display. We saw a few support races, qualifying and SuperPole under a ‘wet format’ which gave the riders 50 minutes and maximum of 12 laps to try and improve their qualifying position, Corser pulled out a scorcher of a lap to secure his place on the front of the grid and nobody else could answer his efforts.

Saturday night was spent down outside the Cowes pub again where I met up with some guys from NSW that I had stayed in the campground with in 1997 when I rode a DR650 over from Perth, they remembered me as ‘the nutter that rode that bloody trailie all the way from Perth the other year’ and I was introduced to their friends as such. These were great guys who I spent Saturday night consuming way too much alcohol with before staggering my way back to the house.

Sunday morning was seen through bloodshot eyes and I was at the track before 8:30 AM again and bought myself a ‘Pit Walk’ pass before they sold out. The Pit Walk commenced at 11 AM and enabled us to checkout all the World Superbike machinery and talk briefly with the riders. I managed to score myself autographed posters of Aaron Slight, Troy Corser, Haga and Peter Goddard. I asked Slights’ mechanic if he could turn my RC46 VFR 800 Honda I have at home into a full works 190 horsepower RC45 Honda like Slight's’ if I gave it to him for a couple of weeks. That gave him a good chuckle. He told me each fork leg alone costs around $25,000 and for this year they even have remote damping reservoirs for each fork leg, this was a first for me as I have only ever seen remote reservoirs’ on rear shocks before..

Race One was a romp away victory for our boy Troy which gave me the opportunity to take the Mickey out of all the British fans.

Race Two and Corser clears out again only to be caught and passed by Fogarty, the lead changed a few times from here with Corser making a mistake on the final lap after coming down from Lukey Heights which allowed Fogarty to pass again, Troy put the hammer down hard and stuck right behind Fogarty through the final two fast corners before pulling out and passing him at the finish line by 5 thousandth’s of a second due to his greater drive out of the final corner. This of course had me ecstatic and only served to increase my teasing of the British supporters. I headed out from the track immediately after Race Two to make it back to the house for the GP Telecast on Channel Ten of the opening round of the 500cc Championship from Malaysia where Mighty Mick came fourth. After a quick shower it was down to Cowes for a Restaurant meal followed by some partying in the main street again, I didn’t party too hard on Sunday night though because I knew how much concentration the Great Ocean Road takes which was where we were riding the next day.

Our tour leader up until now had been Andy, who had done an excellent job while running the tour so far and rode that ST1100 harder than anyone I have ever seen ride a tourer before. Andy flew out after the race and his position was taken aboard the ST1100 by Jim who is the owner/founder of Bikescape and also very good at his job.

Monday morning saw us head out from PI down to Sorrento Quay to take the Sorrento-Queenscliff ferry across Port Phillip Bay. The Ferry was full of bikes and we were joking about how it was going to be a Le Mans type start when the ferry door hit the wharf, restraint was exercised though and everyone got away cleanly. There were only four of us now, Americans’ Rich and Jeff, leader Jim and myself. The Great Ocean Road was as good as I had remembered it and I took off for a while to do a bit of fanging along this very twisty and picturesque coastal road. The sights are great towards the end of the Great Ocean Road with such famous landmarks as the Twelve Apostles. It is a pity Western Australia doesn’t have something similar. We had tea at Port Campbell and stayed in a Motel there where I caught up on some washing and email.

On Tuesday morning Jim and the Americans were heading into Melbourne to see the sights of the big city. I was not keen to stay in Melbourne, so I headed out to catch up with a mate for lunch in Ballarat, then continued on to Bendigo to catch up with another mate where I had tea followed by some Black Douglas and then bed. This was the only really wet day I had experienced thus far, and luckily it didn’t rain on us again for the rest of the tour.

Wednesday saw me up and at it a bit later than normal as I only had about 200 kilometres to do to meet up with the rest of the boys in Bright. They arrived about 4 hours later than I did after visiting a wildlife park to show the visiting Americans’ our native wildlife. After seeing Kangaroos they were now eager to see what it tasted like to eat one, so we headed out to a bistro that had ‘roo on the menu. I had a bit of a lucky break here, where I ended up about $130 ahead on the Keno machine at the Pub which paid for the speeding ticket I had got earlier in the day. This was a very cold night indeed, I believe it got down to around -2 degrees Celsius.

Thursday morning saw me rugged up with two pairs of socks, two pairs of jeans, 3 shirts, thermal lined riding jacket, neck warmer, gloves and helmet to try and make it through the cold day ahead. The road we were going to take had around 6 inches of snow on it, so we elected to take another route which still worked out fairly twisty and very picturesque. We stopped at some lookouts along the way. At one of them, a retirement village coach full of nice people was already there, and the more adventurous of the elderly ladies were trying to blag a ride down the mountain on the back of the bikes, but we got out of it by telling them we didn’t have any spare helmets.  We could have gotten around that by taking turns and borrowing helmets off of each other but we didn’t want to risk the insurance side of things in case we had an accident. The old girls were keen as mustard and had probably done some major adventuring in their time but we had to let them down this time unfortunately. I would have taken as many of them that wanted a ride down the mountain and back if I had been on my own bike and the situation was different. That would have give them some great stories to tell back at the retirement village. We headed through some spectacular alpine country and crossed the Tumut River. Then headed out through some very tight twisty roads out to Cooma where we stayed the night and had quite a few too many beers again in between having dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

Friday morning saw us get off to a late start as a few of our group were somewhat worse for wear, the days of hard riding followed by hard partying had taken their toll on the old fellas’. It was a very cold morning again that saw me rugged up as much as possible for the journey through to Parliament House in Canberra. We then headed out into Sydney’s’ Southern highlands through Moss Vale, Bowral, Mittagong and Picton, over the Razorback to Camden and then into a wet Sydney and back to Bikescape HQ in Chippendale. Where I quickly unloaded my gear, headed out to the airport in a cab and caught a 747 back to Perth, arriving around 10:30 PM on Friday night Perth time. Saturday and Sunday was then spent recovering from my couple of weeks of hard riding and partying.

All in all the Bikescape tour was good value and I may choose to do it again sometime, I think I may alternate between riding over and flying over for the GP and World Superbike rounds. There is no mistake that these race weekends bring many millions of dollars into Victoria each time, it is a great pity that the Western Australian government can’t pull their finger out and build a circuit to rival Phillip Island (which is undoubtedly Australia’s’ greatest dedicated racetrack) and then attract an international event of the same magnitude. I fear that the Australian round of the World Rally Championship will never reach the heights that a World Superbike, Motorcycle Grand Prix or Formula One Grand Prix does, great though that it is, it is still a poor cousin to the three most major international sporting events held in Australia each year. 

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