Last weekend saw the opening round of the inaugural Australian Supermoto Championship staged at Bairnsdale in country Victoria. This sleepy town, a few hours east of Melbourne, was invaded by riders from many parts of Australia, a significant contingent made the trip down from Queensland for the Yamaha sponsored event.

The rain and hail experienced by many parts of Victoria on Saturday verged on biblical proportions. Luckily, no racing was scheduled for Saturday on the modified go-kart circuit.

Overnight, the rain went away, to be replaced by a howling wind that really made life difficult at the unprotected circuit. At times I thought rain would have been preferable to the abominable wind, but thankfully we never had both at the same time, that would have meant the meeting would have had been abandoned for sure.

Many competitors voiced their satisfaction with the circuit and noted that it was probably the closest thing yet seen in Australia to a ‘proper’ European style layout.

The fastest Supermoto competitors got up to around 140kph along the short back straight before throwing their machines in to graceful sideways slides to set up for the left-hander leading on to the main straight.

Turn one was a little similar, except competitors had to slow much more for what was a really tight little turn before another short straight. On the pit straight, a small dip in the track, at about the point where the fast boys started to brake for turn one, caused some impressive back wheel in the air displays as the rear suspension kept on lifting from the upper edge of the dip.

After the short straight out of turn one racers then had a couple of low speed left handers before making an abrupt right on to the infield dirt section. This had a berm on the outside but more time seemed to be made by cutting in close and then gassing it hard for the up-ramp to the tabletop, followed by a double, and another tight right hander before rejoining the bitumen. Then it was on to another short straight before a wide slow left-hander on to the back straight.

All the machines had a few things in common, one cylinder and a single disc front end. Most had some sort of modifications to the front brake, ranging from a completely new rotor, calipers and master cylinder through to a basically standard set-up. The middle ground was taken up by machines running a standard caliper mounted to an aftermarket bracket allowing the use of a larger disc rotor.

Those with dynamite front brakes also needed stiffer fork springs and reduced travel, some had got around to this already while many had only just taken delivery of their machines and had little time to get their bikes ready for the event. Experienced World Grand Prix racer Mark Willis actually ran his CRF in during morning practice. His machine had a larger front disc mated to a standard caliper, standard suspension, an aftermarket muffler, and 17” rims with cut road race tyres.

A few in the S1 class had specialist supermoto machines at their disposal. These machines come from the factory with road biased suspension, 17” rims and powerful brakes.

Rob Twyerould had an extremely powerful ‘factory’ version of the KTM Supermoto, with lots of carbon-fibre and extra special components, not all of which would be made available to just any competitor.  ‘Doctor’ Rob looked set to maybe take the overall win before a horrendous fall in the third race saw him miss out on a significant points score. He bounced back bravely in the final race to take a fourth place, earning him fifth overall for the day.

Fourth overall in the premier S1 category went to Graham Cheney. Cameron Donald had been invited to ride an LC4 KTM Supermoto machine as a guest rider for the newly formed ‘Team Subway’, headed up by the man who has got supermoto off the ground in Australia, Paul Caridi.

Donald returned the favour with excellent results, even though it was clearly obvious he was suffering some handling problems with the front of the machine.  Excessive fork patter on entry was plain for all to see. Unfortunately, they never managed to cure the problem, which held Donald back a little, but he still came away with third overall. An excellent result for the road racer who now heads to Malaysia to compete in that country’s high profile supersport competition.

KTM’s Stuart Bennett put in an impressive display of super smooth riding to take second overall. But the smoothest of all was Husaberg’s Mark Avard.

Avard started slowly with a sixth place in the first leg before taking the win in the final three races to score the overall points win and with it the lead in the championship.

Likeable Queensland competitor Jon Hafey was on form to be a definite front-runner, before a sickening crash on the back straight after coming together with a slower rider. The result, a badly broken arm, saw Hafey carted off to Traralgon hospital. He had two plates and ten screws inserted on Monday and was released from hospital on Tuesday. He is set to fly home to Queensland today (Wed'). Hopefully he makes it back to supermoto competition before the season is out as he definitely had the speed to give Avard, Bennett and Donald a good shake.

Mark Willis took four wins from four starts on a basically standard CRF450R Honda in the S2 class. He clearly got faster throughout the day and now has the opportunity to properly prepare his CRF for supermoto competition before the next round, just to make things harder for his competitors…

Adam Altham, riding for the new ‘Team Subway’, couldn’t quite match Willis, but rode brilliantly and had to contend with regular challenges from Josh Houwen, who twice got the better of him.

Another one to prove that having the best tackle is no guarantee of success was 19-year-old Daniel McCoy. He totally dominated the support races aboard his YZ250F machine. The bike was in virtually standard trim and is actually his practice bike for Australian SX and MX where he rides for ‘Team Serco’. Only an aftermarket exhaust, 17” rims, and cut GPR-70 tyres joined the normal MX modifications such as bars etc. A standard front brake also worked well enough for McCoy to take four wins from as many starts.

Daniel is the young cousin of current Kawasaki MotoGP star Garry McCoy and has been a front runner so far in this year’s SX Championship and fancies his chances for an Australian MX Championship this year, the first round of which is to be held in Queensland on March 16th.

Dean Meuleman rode brilliantly and pulled off some mighty impressive slides in an effort to catch McCoy, and nearly came to grief a couple of times trying to close the gap, but McCoy was on fire.

Through the dirt section McCoy was probably the fastest out of all three classes, he made significant time there every lap, and then backed it up with good speed on the tar. McCoy, on a 250cc four-stroke, was up against competitors on much larger 450cc and above machines with lots more power, but that made no difference as he walked away from all of them. In fact, he was only a second slower per lap than the fastest S2 competitors, and a further second behind the factory supported S1 racers!

Regular Victorian road racer Ewan McClue also rode well, as did fellow road racer David Malins.

Paying spectators numbered around the 500 mark. As the event was held at a venue some hours from Melbourne, and was not heavily advertised, then a bigger crowd could not, realistically, have been expected. Also not helping the cause was the diabolical weather conditions, which over the course of the weekend would have made all but the most hard-core race fan stay among the creature comforts of home.

The event ran fairly smoothly, there were a few hiccups, and fine-tuning to the program, which was to be expected for this first event. But overall it ran timely, and apart from a maybe little too long lunch break, caused by a couple of factors, punters were entertained with a mainly non-stop run of action.

Nobody who rides a motorcycle could have not come away impressed with the level of skill displayed by the vast majority of competitors. It was a class field, don’t think just because the likes of Willis, or the young McCoy, were dominant in their classes that their fellow competitors were not up to par. They all displayed a huge level of talent and bike control, which made for some thrilling racing and great sideways action. Just check out the images we have published, nearly 100 of them, or the videos we have put on the site to see what you missed if you couldn’t make it. I can’t help but keep going through them.

We posted the schedule for the event on Friday. During the weekend, and after, we spoke to some people who work in the Melbourne bike industry who didn’t even know the event was on. Hopefully this situation will get better as the coverage of this event gets wide dissemination in the motorcycle press.

However, it will be interesting to note how much coverage the regular mainstream road bike magazines give the new sport. The Melbourne based road bike journalists were distinct in their absence from the event…

ADB, a specialist dirt bike magazine, seemed to be some sort of sponsor of the event as their banners and flags were stationed around the track. ADB belongs to a rival company to those which most of the larger road bike magazines are owned by. This could possibly lead to some sort of backlash from the larger road bike magazines.

Hopefully I am proven wrong, and we see that they help to promote this exciting new sport.

The second round of the championship was to be held in Tasmania, but is now in the process of being relocated to a venue in New South Wales. A few options are currently being considered with a decision expected soon.