Flashback Friday | 1999 ARRC Finale – Floppy disks and the first days of MCNews

Flashback Friday

Floppy disks, dial-up and the first days of MCNews.com.au

This one takes us right back to the beginning. When Steve Martin clinched the 1999 Australian Superbike Championship at Eastern Creek, I had only started MCNews.com.au a month earlier, knowing nobody in the motorcycle industry or motorcycle media. What was I thinking…

Twenty-seven years later, that report is still sitting in the archives. Along with recording a significant moment in Australian racing, it is a little snapshot of where this website began.

The photograph of Steve at Wanneroo below is another relic from that year. I took it on my first digital camera, a Sony Mavica that saved its photographs onto 3.5-inch floppy disks. A camera with a floppy disk drive sounds rather improbable now, but that was my introduction to digital photography.

And what a time to start covering the sport. Ducati 996s, Kawasaki ZX-7RRs, Suzuki GSX-R750s and the new litre class bikes arriving, and a whole gaggle of Aussie kids first making their way in the sport, amongst some seasoned veterans. There is plenty to stir the memories before we even get to the racing.

For this Flashback Friday, we wind the clock back to the 1999 weekend South Australian Steve Martin delivered the first Australian Superbike title for himself, the Ducati Dealer Team and Ducati.

Seven points needed, two wins delivered

Martin arrived at the 1999 Australian Superbike Championship finale needing just seven points to secure the championship. There was every reason to play the percentages, bring the Ducati home and get on with the celebrations.

He had other ideas.

After topping the times through Friday and Saturday’s practice and qualifying sessions, Martin claimed his sixth pole position of the season with a 1m31.98s lap. He then led the opening race from start to finish, beating team-mate Craig Connell by a second and a half to settle the title in emphatic fashion.

With the championship secured, Martin had to work a little harder for his second victory. Running third in the early laps, he moved through to take the lead on lap five and went on to beat Connell by 1.14 seconds.

Two races, two Ducati Dealer Team one-two finishes, and a new champion who had made quite clear how he wanted to win his title.

Steve Martin

Heading into that weekend, I felt like I had so much pressure on my shoulders. My team boss, Arthur Davis, was literally telling me, “Take it easy, get the points and win the championship.” That would have been the smart thing to do, especially considering that at Eastern Creek, my teammate Craig Connell was always faster than me.

But I wanted it badly.

I qualified with a 1:31 lap, which was about a second quicker than the rest of the field. If there was ever such a thing as a perfect weekend, that was it. There was so much pressure going into Race One, but I got the job done.

Race Two was the most enjoyable race I have ever ridden in my life. I felt alive. There was no pressure anymore, and I just rode. I ended up getting the double, and it was an incredible feeling.

It’s true that back then the bikes were much more expensive, but there was also a huge advantage to that. It allowed riders like Mat Mladin, Troy Corser, Troy Bayliss and countless others I’ve probably forgotten to ride essentially the same machinery as the riders competing on the world stage.

That gave us the opportunity to go overseas as wildcards and put ourselves in front of the people who mattered in international racing.

When we moved to the cheaper bikes, yes, they were more affordable, but I also noticed that far fewer Australian riders ended up going overseas and staying there for an extended period.

Thankfully, I think it has come full circle now. It looks like the doors are starting to open again for Australians to get overseas rides, and I think that’s fantastic.

It means a lot more young riders can follow their dreams, just like I was able to follow mine.

A season built on speed and consistency

The Eastern Creek double capped a season in which Martin combined outright pace with the consistency needed to win a championship.

Across 26 races, he recorded eight victories, ten second places and two thirds. That was 20 podium finishes, helping him accumulate 461 points and finish 73 clear of Andrew Pitt on Kawasaki’s ZX-7RR.

Andrew Pitt had a championship of his own to celebrate, having taken the Australian Supersport crown by a single point over Kevin Curtain, while Connell finished third in the Superbike standings on 340 points.

Craig Connell’s pair of second places at Eastern Creek told only part of his story. A high-speed crash at Calder in July had left him battling injuries through the latter part of the season, after an earlier DNF at Phillip Island had already dented his title hopes.

He still had the speed to set a new race lap record of 1m32.81s in the Eastern Creek opener, then backed up that performance with another second place to complete the team’s clean sweep.

Craig Connell

“It’s been a long hard season for me. I felt very good in the opening rounds of the championship, but then had a DNF at Phillip Island and the Calder accident which cost me a lot of points and any realistic chance of challenging for the title. Steve (Martin) has ridden very well all year and we had two great dices here this weekend. The team really deserved the one-two finish we gave them today as they have worked tirelessly throughout the season. It has been a great year for all concerned with Ducati and the Ducati Dealer Team.”

When Superbikes were $100,000 machinery

It is worth pausing on just what Martin was riding. The Ducati 996RS was a very special piece of equipment, from an era when Australian Superbike still largely followed the FIM Superbike formula and the leading machines were extensively modified racers.

They began with production motorcycles, but the specification allowed a great deal of expensive engineering between the showroom and the starting grid. Specialised triple clamps, suspension and brakes, costly kit gearboxes, race radiators and highly tuned engines were all part of the equation. These were beautiful, highly strung machines, with an appetite for money to match their performance.

Martin’s Ducati and Pitt’s Kawasaki ZX-7RR were among the stars of that era. Shawn Giles finished fourth in the 1999 championship on the Ansett Air Freight-backed Suzuki GSX-R750, then took that model to the Australian Superbike title the following year.

Getting one of those FIM-spec Superbikes onto the track could cost well over $100,000. That was more than a quarter of a century ago when an outer suburban house could be had for the same money. Meanwhile, a Production Superbike was ready to race for less than $25,000.

The production bikes that changed the equation

Yamaha had already embraced that cheaper route with the arrival of the original YZF-R1 in 1998. Its 1000 cc four-cylinder engine sat outside the established FIM Superbike formula of 750 cc fours and 1000 cc twins, but the new Production Superbike sub-category gave it a place in the Australian championship with much tighter limits on modification.

Kevin Curtain and the Radar’s Yamaha team demonstrated what could be done with the R1, taking the 1998 Production Superbike title. When we revisited that period in our feature on Kevin Curtain and the original Yamaha YZF-R1, he put the difference in cost into perspective.

Kevin Curtain

“Funny thing was our bike cost under $20,000 and the FIM-spec bikes were all way over $100,000!”

That helps explain the mix of machinery in the results below. Different approaches to building a Superbike were sharing Australian grids during a period of considerable change.

Ultimately, economics prevailed. The national championship moved away from those expensive FIM specifications, with the old-style FIM Superbikes giving way to Production Superbike rules from 2001 as the sport sought to rein in costs.

Giles bridged that transition perfectly. After winning the 2000 title on his FIM-spec GSX-R750, he retained the crown on the GSX-R1000 under the new Production Superbike rules in 2001. As he later explained in our profile of his career, that second title was particularly satisfying after suggestions his first had owed too much to the machinery advantage.

There was a battle over the direction of Australian road racing beyond the technical regulations, too. The Shell Oils-backed Australian Road Racing Championships and Terry O’Neill’s Formula Xtreme Series were competing for supremacy, adding another dimension to an already fascinating period.

The financial logic behind the move towards production machinery was compelling. Even so, looking back at Martin’s 996RS, it is hard not to miss the extraordinary hardware that the old rules brought to Australian racetracks. The GSX-R750 campained by Giles through the same period was as equally special and bespoke as the Ducati, it just had a lot less capacity to play with.

One point in Supersport, two titles for Parkes

The final championship standings add another layer to the story. While Martin finished with a commanding Superbike margin, the Supersport title could scarcely have been closer: Andrew Pitt on 179 points, Kevin Curtain on 178.

There was plenty of double duty going on, too. Pitt, Curtain, Adam Fergusson and Paul Free all featured among the leading finishers in both the Superbike and Supersport championships.

Broc Parkes went one better by topping two championship tables. He won the 250 cc Production title with 220 points to Craig Coxhell’s 188, and also headed the 125 cc standings with another 220-point tally.

With 250 cc GP bikes, Harley Sportsters and Sidecars also represented in the final standings, there was quite a variety of machinery sharing the Australian road racing spotlight.

That 1999 ARRC Eastern Creek finale

Behind the two Ducatis, Shawn Giles completed the opening-race podium on his Suzuki GSX-R750, while Kevin Curtain took third in race two aboard Yamaha’s YZF-R7.

Adam Fergusson was sixth and fourth on a Honda CBR900RR, Paul Free seventh and fifth on a GSX-R750, and Chris Vermeulen finished eighth in the opener on a Yamaha YZF-R1.

There is another reminder of the era tucked away at the bottom of our original report: a warning that the website’s new index system could take up to 90 seconds to load for the first time on what were dial-up connections back in the day…

Plenty has changed since those first weeks of MCNews.com.au. The appeal of looking back through a results sheet like this certainly hasn’t.

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
Eastern Creek Superbike Race One Top Ten

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
Eastern Creek Superbike Race Two Top Ten

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
Final Championship Standings

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
Superbike

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
Supersport

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
250 Production

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
250 Grand Prix

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
125 Grand Prix

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
Harley Sportsters

1999 Australian Road Racing Championships
Sidecars

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