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Transcript

Craig Dack - Part 1 · Rusty's Garage

0:02
A listener production.
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I'm automotive commentator and journalist Greg Rust and this is Rusty's Garage.
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My guest for this episode has done it all, from successful rider who represented Australia to team owner with countless wins and titles there too.
0:36
A mentor who's helped guide and shape the careers of several Aussie and Kiwi motocross and supercross stars.
0:43
He gets as much of a buzz now working as a team owner and encouraging that next generation as...
0:49
as when he was wowing audiences in Mr. Motocross as a competitor.
0:53
His record, check this out, as a rider, is pretty impressive.
0:57
Four of those Mr. Motocross titles, 250cc and 500cc Australian Motocross Championships.
1:04
He won a title over the ditch too.
1:06
There are Supercross Masters crowns and 250cc Supercross Championships, not to mention representing Australia in the World Motocross Teams event,
1:17
six times.
1:18
The DAC attack, as one journalist called it, sure netted some victories.
1:24
2023 marked 30 years as a team owner, something he launched into when his own riding career came to an end in the early 90s.
1:32
CDR has proudly been Yamaha that whole time,
1:36
And as you'll hear, he worked closely with a young Chad Reed.
1:40
His learnings on the commercial side, more than three decades of it, and how he used to manage it himself, learning the art of people management when you go from athlete to being in the athlete's corner, and his thoughts on the future of the sport.
1:56
Oh, and you'll enjoy a laugh or two as well, including AFL star Gary Ablett Sr. wanting to ride with him, an aerobics television show promo that had Supercross promoters seriously worried about one of their headline acts, and a sliding doors moment that could have seen him touring car racing for an icon.
2:16
I hope you enjoy the chat.
2:20
Daka, welcome.
2:21
This is well overdue.
2:23
I should have had you on ages ago and we'll get to it a little bit later, but you have been recognised for your contribution to the industry, to riding and more in a fairly significant way in recent months at the Australian Grand Prix.
2:37
I want to celebrate that with you later in the podcast.
2:39
Let's kick off.
2:40
where it all kind of began.
2:42
Where did that first gravitation to anything with wheels and an engine, two wheels, come from?
2:50
And am I right in saying that it was kind of Suzuki early on, whereas the bulk of your professional life as an owner and a racer has been largely Yamaha, hasn't it?
3:00
Well, it has in like the sort of last sort of 40 years it's been Yamaha.
3:04
The career's been so long now, but it started off rusty.
3:09
I was born and bred in Cronulla on the southern beaches of Sydney.
3:13
So I was a nipper surf lover.
3:15
I was always very active and always in the water surfing, whatever, around there up until nine years of age.
3:22
Then my parents got an invitation for a housing low to move out to the west, you know, to a place called Wilmot, which was sort of deep in the western suburbs.
3:34
So we went from the ocean to the paddocks to the bush.
3:38
So every sort of – my dad and I were driving along the Great Western Highway one day near St Mary's and we noticed in this paddock – I would have been only nine years, eight, nine years of age at that point – saw these motorbikes in this farmer's paddock just going around in circles.
3:54
And what it was, you used to be able to hire, they were Honda QA50s, and you'd give them five bucks for an hour to go in there on a Saturday morning and just ride around in circles.
4:05
So that's where it started, my love for motorbikes.
4:09
And then my father said, I wanted one.
4:11
Then my father said, well, if you save up half the money for one, he'll put in the rest.
4:16
So I got a paper run.
4:18
And did that for a year.
4:19
And one day I came out, I saved all the money up, and I just threw it on the coffee table in front of my mum and dad and said, righto, let's go.
4:26
You buy me.
4:27
Like a jam jar full of coins, was it?
4:29
Well, actually, I'll tell you the truth.
4:31
My dad and I used to go shooting, rabbit shooting.
4:34
And I used to collect all these shotgun cartridges, you know, the cartridges, and I had all my money stuffed in there so my sister and brother didn't knock it off.
4:42
So I dropped them all out on the coffee table and said, let's get all these shotgun cartridges full of money.
4:47
Let's go.
4:49
Excellent.
4:49
What was the first bike then?
4:50
And have you got vivid memories of that?
4:52
Yeah, I actually got one.
4:53
I've got it restored.
4:54
Fantastic.
4:54
It's 1972 QA50, a little Honda.
4:58
And then I moved up to the XR75 where I then joined the Blacktown Minibike Club.
5:04
Back then in New South Wales, you couldn't race.
5:06
You had to do these sort of Gymkhana type races.
5:10
And so I did that for a couple of years.
5:12
And I went on a short stint on Suzuki, just a few years, RM80 and RM125.
5:19
Then before I moved sort of to Yamaha, ran away from home for a couple of years to Honda.
5:23
But I didn't have to Yamaha.
5:26
I think you've reflected to Racer X about that.
5:29
And that brief stint with Honda, we're probably jumping forward a little bit here, Daka.
5:33
But that brief stint was more or less taking over from Leeski when he went off to America in the mid-90s, wasn't it?
5:41
Mid-80s, I beg your pardon.
5:42
Correct, pretty much, pretty much.
5:43
Jeff was sort of the dominant.
5:45
I broke two femurs' legs at separate times through the early 80s because Jeff and I were very similar, similar age, actually, same age.
5:55
So I lost a couple of years of development there through those injuries.
5:59
And so through that period, Jeff became the guy, the standout guy in 83, 84, 85,
6:05
Then he took off to America, and I was sort of just starting to come up behind him about then.
6:12
So the time he left, I took on his ride at Honda.
6:15
So that was in 1986, 87.
6:18
Can we just come back a fraction?
6:19
Were there kind of early heroes for you in all of this?
6:22
I think when Crompo came on the podcast, he has –
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if memory serves me, he has a very vivid recollection of people like Roger DeCosta and that sort of stuff.
6:33
Were there guys floating around as you started to get into this where you went, you know, I want to be like that or, you know, he's my hero kind of thing?
6:41
Absolutely, yeah.
6:42
I remember Emery Park and Emery Park's a pretty famous place in Australia before any old school motorsport heads because you had, you know, flat track Emery Park, short circuit track.
6:54
You had the Emery Park Hill Climb.
6:56
That's an old-fashioned hill climb there.
6:58
You had the Emery Park Motocross Track and, of course, the car race track.
7:03
So it's a famous old place.
7:04
So I used to go there every year and watch the Mr. Motocross series.
7:10
And those guys, I remember sitting up on the rocks there and watching those guys ride.
7:15
And the people that stood out were Stephen Gore.
7:17
I remember Stephen Gore doing wheelies up the straight, doing a P-side.
7:21
And I remember I'd go home and just...
7:24
do that on my push bike for days, riding up the street doing these signs like Gawley, you know.
7:31
And then Anthony Gunter, Trevor Williams, there was a whole bunch of guys around that time.
7:36
But to me, going to Mr. Motocross in those days was just like surreal sitting on the watch.
7:42
They were like superheroes to me, those guys.
7:44
They were in this riding gear that you've never seen, these helmets and this colourful gear and stuff.
7:50
And then at the time also, Vince Tessarero, who did the Mr. Motocross series, had a really good knack of marketing before his time, Vince.
7:59
And I remember seeing those guys in the back of Pepsi cans or Coca-Cola cans and back of cereal packets and all that.
8:05
And that's sort of what – that was the point where I'm going, I'm going to do that one day.
8:10
Lee Diffie talks about – I mean, you went on to have great success there, mate.
8:13
But he talks about Mr. Motocross so fondly how –
8:19
these heroes, what they got to do.
8:22
And as you kind of just described, the way they were promoted off track as well, it was a very, very good period that for the sport, wasn't it?
8:31
It really was.
8:32
And, I mean, that period with Gore, Gunter, Trevor Williams, Geoff Worrell, I think it was another day, Mark Pace, that was kind of the golden era of that.
8:43
And then I saw it sort of come in in the sort of mid-80s and it was sort of,
8:48
My name was pretty strong then because the indoor supercross thing started as well and the sport sort of got that sort of coding of professionalism like a lot of sports did in the mid-80s.
8:59
Up until the mid-80s, AFL players and rugby league players were still trading on a Tuesday and Thursday night and had a job through the day.
9:08
like Gaul and Gunter.
9:10
They were still, you know, working and then racing.
9:12
In the end, they got out of their normal job and became professional racers full-time.
9:17
But my era and Jeff Lees, we were the first or the start of that fully paid.
9:21
Boy, races, straight out of school getting paid.
9:24
So, you know, although it was the end of the Mr. Motocross Series golden days, we started to take off of the indoor Supercross, became the new popular thing.
9:33
Tell me about that window between what you've just described and that young fellow getting that bike with his dad.
9:41
Did you take to it with relative ease and have a kind of connection with the motorcycle?
9:48
How difficult was it to win?
9:52
Can you remember those early wins and how much you savoured those?
9:58
I remember I was just absolutely hooked on it from the day I got my first motorbike.
10:03
So that Q850 I said I got, I saved up and they bought me the bike, but they gave it to me as a Christmas present.
10:11
Love it.
10:12
And what I did notice, it was an obsession straight away because on Christmas morning I got the bike,
10:18
And we just had a normal house, three-bedroom house, a small backyard.
10:22
Remember from the time I got the bike in the morning, I just did circles around the backyard all morning until lunchtime.
10:29
And that particular year, it was my mum and dad's time turned to host the family Christmas party.
10:34
So their brothers and sisters all came.
10:37
So my mum made me stop riding the bike at lunchtime so everybody can have a peaceful lunch and not hear this bike.
10:43
So I was allowed to start the bike, so I pushed it around in circles while they had lunch with the motor off because I couldn't stop.
10:52
But that was the start of it.
10:54
I remember just we had paddocks out the back, so I'd just take it out the back after school every day and I remember just being obsessed with motorbikes from that time.
11:02
And, you know, once I got into it, a couple of years later, got into the –
11:08
the Blacktown Minibike Club and those Gymkhana events, everything I did I always seemed to win.
11:14
I just had a natural knack at it and it just snowballed from there.
11:19
I love the fixation.
11:20
I think that is so important when you're looking at races now, the fact that they are just immersed in it, in any sport for that matter.
11:27
I've got a little nephew who loves, lives and breathes his AFL and I can see that, what you've just described in him.
11:35
That's such an important asset, an important thing.
11:40
How did you and your family stitch it together?
11:43
Because, Dacra, it doesn't seem like –
11:45
money was necessarily on tap, but you're probably getting early lessons around how you can – because it gets more expensive as you climb the ladder and so on.
11:53
How did you go about all that process?
11:55
Yeah, well, they did what they could.
11:57
I had a brother and sister, a younger brother and sister that they had to look after as well.
12:01
My sister used to do roller skating competitions.
12:04
My other brother just did whatever.
12:05
I can't even remember what he did.
12:08
And, yeah, my dad was riding trials at the time as well.
12:12
So sometimes my mum would take me to a motocross race and help me out if my dad was riding and other times they'd both take me.
12:19
Somehow they just made ends meet.
12:21
But I can't recall, you know, whether – because it was all like the Blacktown Minibike Club was only 20 minutes from home and we never chased events around.
12:31
And it's not until –
12:32
Really, sort of the latest stages at my schooling where it all started to become quite serious, I got my first sponsor with Brian Collins Motorcycles.
12:43
That must have been at 16 years of age, something like that.
12:48
And then I couldn't get out of school quick enough, so I left at year 10th.
12:52
And within three months, I was living in America, chasing the motorbike journey.
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Unbelievable.
12:58
So again, as they often talk about, no plan B, right?
13:01
You put everything into plan A and off you went.
13:04
Yeah, and I still don't know to this day when I went to America, I went with Stephen Gall and a few of the other guys.
13:11
We used to go over there at the end of the year or early the year after and spend three months there.
13:19
We could ride on a Thursday night at a place called Ascot near LA, which is an old speedway.
13:25
Then we race on Friday night near Riverside.
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We race Saturday and Sunday.
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So we're racing four times a week.
13:33
And, you know, you'd make $100 here and $200 here and just sort of, I didn't even know how I pulled it all together.
13:38
I'm sleeping on people's lounge room floors and that's kind of, then I came back to Australia and that's when it all started to take off for me in the early 80s.
13:48
What was that American scene like and being exposed to that?
13:52
I mean, everyone talks about it, you know, the names, the tracks and so on and the state of the sport over there at the time.
13:59
I mean, a little bit surreal, even though you're probably trying to stitch it together, a bit surreal to be there and be a part of that.
14:06
It was.
14:06
It really was.
14:08
It was sort of the fallout period on any Sunday, if anybody remembers that dirt bike movie.
14:16
Iconic.
14:17
That's right.
14:18
And it was sort of, you know, Steve McQueen was in that movie.
14:22
Anybody remembers Bob Hatter, he was in that movie.
14:25
So I was going to races where I'd see Bob Hatter riding and all that.
14:29
So the sport in California,
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or is and still is the biggest dirt bike market by far in the world.
14:36
World.
14:37
You know, so we were racing on tracks by the name for people who were fans of the sport.
14:42
They would know Saddleback and Carlsbad and, you know, Corona.
14:46
That was a Friday night race.
14:48
You couldn't hardly see anything, but we still raced.
14:51
So it was just, yeah, you're right, mate.
14:53
It was surreal and it was a huge building block for my domestic career.
14:59
You talked about just the constant riding there, right?
15:04
I mean you probably were coming through too when the advent of being –
15:08
fitter on the motorcycle became, you know, grew in a level of importance, right?
15:13
Hard to beat that match fitness, but were you doing other things off the bike to keep in shape that would help you when it came to racing?
15:19
What were you doing?
15:20
Very much.
15:20
Yeah, very much.
15:21
I mean, a lot of people who know our sport know how physical it is and how much you have to do.
15:27
And yes, it was all started that learning process.
15:31
part of my career, Rusty, where I was trying to put it together because everybody in anything you do, when there's a physical aspect to it, and no more in motocross is one of the most physical sports in the world, you have to find out what works for you.
15:43
So I was experimenting along the way to see what worked for me.
15:47
Some people like to do weights and a lot of cycling and ride their bike.
15:51
And my thing was ride as much as I can, dirt bikes, because we have to, even to this day, riders are riding three or four times a week.
15:58
A week, yeah.
15:59
Unlike other forms of motorsport where they drive the car or race the bikes at the race meeting.
16:05
We have to ride, you know, three or four times during the week.
16:09
So I was still trying to find my way.
16:11
In fact, in the early 80s or in the mid-80s when I sort of became the new guy on the block,
16:18
The Institute of Sport in Canberra got me to the Institute of Sport and had me there for a few days to do all sorts of tests on me to see because I never had any data on motocross guys.
16:31
And they actually did all these tests with me over the period of three or four days to get some data.
16:37
And our fitness level was that at the time of Rob DeCostella, who was a marathon runner.
16:42
Yeah.
16:42
So our fitness level was, because they had data on him, was the level of him.
16:47
So they put us under a high endurance athlete.
16:51
Doesn't mean we could go out and win a marathon because we didn't have the technique for it.
16:55
But that was the assessment of the level of our fitness.
17:09
Enjoying Daka?
17:10
Your lovely ski.
17:11
He was another pioneering Aussie who wasn't afraid to take on the best dirt bike races in the US.
17:16
There was some hard graft in those days which were at times a bit surreal.
17:21
Yeah, I'm like, what am I doing?
17:23
I'm putting his pants on and helmet on and, you know, I don't even know if he knew that.
17:27
I mean, I obviously raced against him a lot in the States and I was always just too scared to say, hey mate, do you realise that I'm tired of all your stuff?
17:39
You can find Jeff's two-part episode with his friend Rusty in the garage library and it's not just for motocross and supercross lovers.
17:46
Jeff raced sprint cars for a time too and has become a leading motorcycle industry leader figure since retiring from racing.
17:53
Now back to another who has mentored the next generation, Craig Dack.
18:00
What about mechanically and technically?
18:02
Did that side of it, you know, was it about learning with dad and coming to grips with it?
18:08
Were you kind of super fascinated with bikes and suspension and engines and so on?
18:13
What was your skill set like on that side?
18:18
Not very good.
18:19
Really?
18:19
No, no.
18:20
Mechanically, in my whole career, if I ever walked into a workshop full of mechanics, they'd kick me straight out the door and don't touch anything.
18:28
I used to have a nickname called Dak Disaster.
18:31
So I was more than happy with that title because I hate working on bikes.
18:35
But you must have been able to describe it, Craig, and to feedback.
18:39
Yeah, probably that's why I was able to be not too bad at setting up the bike because any engineer or your head technician, one of the things as a rider, the best thing to do is just tell them what you're feeling or don't tell them what you think they need to do.
18:54
Just explain to them what the bike's doing.
18:57
Let them wave their wand over the bike and do their magic.
19:00
You go out and do some more laps and go, yep, that was good or not any good.
19:04
And they'll go try this.
19:06
So probably because I had no preconceived technical idea, I was probably a good test rider, which I ended up being not a bad test rider.
19:15
I actually did a lot of test riding for Yamaha Japan throughout the end of my career in Europe.
19:21
Did you enjoy that?
19:22
I really did like it, yeah.
19:23
So heavily involved in, you know, prototype models for the future and I did that for about a year or two.
19:31
It was quite intriguing.
19:33
You mentioned one nickname there a minute ago.
19:35
You didn't sound like you liked that nickname too much, but the other one that fans know closely, of course, is Dak Attack, right?
19:41
Who coined that?
19:42
How did that come about?
19:43
And it remains to this day, doesn't it?
19:46
It does.
19:46
I've still got people come up to me at race meetings and say, hey, the Dak attack, it still pops up.
19:52
It happened in a friend of mine, Andrew Club, who was a journalist within the motorcycle industry, used to write for a magazine called Rebs, I think it was.
20:07
And I finished, it was a year I went right up to Jeff Leisk and they said, Leisk wins championship, but watch out, here comes the Dak attack.
20:15
So that's where it started and it's stuck there ever since.
20:19
And actually my company name is Dakatak Proprietary Limited.
20:23
Limited.
20:23
That's terrific.
20:24
Four consecutive Mr. Motocross titles.
20:27
I mean, we can sit here and run off the string of things that you won as a rider and
20:32
during your career.
20:33
We've talked about the, you know, how special the sport was at that stage.
20:37
What did that mean to you?
20:38
And is there one of them in that stretch there that was either, you know, really hard fought that you savour the most or perhaps it's like in a lot of instances just the difficulty of winning that first one and what it meant to you?
20:50
Yeah, the first one.
20:51
The first one because it was just, you know, like I said, it was only a few years before that, several years before that, that I was sitting on the rocks at Emery Park.
21:02
you know, watching those heroes, those legends, those sort of kind of superstars I saw them as.
21:09
And Stephen Gore actually was still racing at that period when I won my first Mr. Motocross.
21:14
So, you know, that was sort of, again, surreal in itself.
21:18
So winning the first one was, it felt, looking back, it felt easy now, um, but I'm not, I
21:25
because it was the first one, but it was the most exhilarating.
21:27
It was so emotional and so surreal.
21:30
The second year was much, much harder for some reason.
21:33
We had a bunch of muddy races, so the weather elements worked against me and I had a big crash in Adelaide and hurt myself pretty bad, so I missed out on two races on that day but came back and still won the next two races on the same day.
21:48
So that holds a fond memory on how I had to tough it out that day.
21:54
So, yes, I won in 86, 87, 88.
21:58
And then 89, I went to Europe, but it didn't run that year.
22:01
And I came home in 90.
22:03
And then last year, I won and I won my fourth one then.
22:06
Unreal.
22:07
In that period, we talked about this off air before we got going today.
22:11
Is it true that you had some dealings with Peter Brock, lots of people listening to the podcast like a Brock story?
22:16
And was there almost a sliding doors moment there where he perhaps wanted you to bring him into the fold and maybe you might have contemplated a touring car move?
22:24
Yeah, I met Peter, me and Neil Crompton, we still aren't good friends, we just don't see each other much anymore.
22:31
But Neil and I knocked around because quite a bit.
22:34
And he was involved in the Channel 7 sports show at the time and he was a big fan of motocross.
22:41
Neil was a good motocross rider if anybody didn't know that.
22:43
He was, yeah.
22:44
He was a member of the Ballarat Rovers Motorcycle Club.
22:47
And so we started knocking around quite a lot, me and Neil.
22:52
And one day we were down in Victoria and he took me to this, I don't know what, it was Peter Brock's garage, I guess it was, where he was doing.
23:02
And he took me out of the back to meet Peter.
23:04
And Peter had this clay, was making the front end of a Skoda.
23:11
a car called a Skoda.
23:12
He had this clay model of the front of a car of a Skoda and he was shaving the front fender in this white suit and his mask and that's how I met Peter for the first time.
23:23
Yeah, madness.
23:24
Wow.
23:25
Yeah, he had some sort of contract going, I think, with Skoda where he was going to do a HSV Skoda or something like that.
23:32
And anyway, so that's when I first met Peter.
23:35
Then we sort of just became friends then.
23:37
So he was kind of still in the prime of his career.
23:41
And I was going to some of the touring car races.
23:44
He was coming to some of my races.
23:47
And, you know, we'd go back and forward.
23:49
And then at the end of 88, I think it was, I was about November and I was going to Europe the next year, 89, to do the world championship.
23:58
So I already had everything sort of squared away.
24:02
And Peter rang me out of the blue and just said, hey, Craig, you know, it's touring cars, it's full of sort of established guys and all that.
24:09
We wanted to put someone in our program, a young guy to sort of foster and build up and sort of train for the future.
24:16
We want that to be you, me.
24:18
And I went,
24:19
Oh, okay.
24:20
Which, you know, it was something really strongly to consider, of course, but I'd already had commitments to go to Europe.
24:27
And I said, no, I actually can't do it.
24:28
I have to honor my commitment.
24:30
So who knows for the, you know, as you said, those sliding door moments, it could have been a whole different world for me, but you know, I'm not regretting anything I did for sure.
24:39
No, we want to focus here mainly on bikes and racing, but I mean, was there maybe a
24:45
Was there any other four-wheel stuff in your chapter, in your time?
24:49
We did a promotional thing once at Parramatta Speedway.
24:52
There was Gaw, who was it?
24:54
Gaw, myself, Gardner and Doon.
24:58
Excellent.
24:58
Had a little fling in the spring car and that was pretty amazing.
25:03
Nothing serious, just a promo night.
25:05
But apart from that, not much.
25:07
I did a bit of Formula Ford stuff and stuff like that, but nothing serious.
25:11
Awesome.
25:11
You've touched on injury a little bit here and we can't do a pod like this and not talk about that because your game can be so brutal at times.
25:20
Have there been a couple that were difficult to get over that were maybe a bit borderline from a career standpoint?
25:28
Maybe you nurse an injury even now.
25:30
Yeah, I'm pretty good.
25:31
All my injuries I had, mate, were always, they call them mid-shaft breaks, like femurs and arms, you know, snapping in half.
25:41
And they're ugly at the time, you know.
25:43
I remember one time when I broke my femur, I was laying on my back and half my leg was laying across here.
25:49
And I'm going, oh, God, how are they going to fix this?
25:51
But yeah.
25:52
It bent like a banana over your shoulder.
25:54
They fixed it.
25:56
But so they're ugly breaks but they heal up straight.
25:59
So a lot of my injuries, I never had any ligament problems in knees or wrists or anything like that.
26:04
So I had a lot of injuries but all ugly breaks at the time but healed up really good.
26:10
So I'm pretty good at the moment.
26:13
There is a yarn about your physio and I reckon it involves an AFL player and Gary Ablett and you wanted to go bike riding but they weren't too keen on that, were they?
26:23
Is that right?
26:24
Well, when I ran away from home from Yamaha, which was 86, I lived in Sydney and I signed a contract with Honda for 86, 87 or 86.
26:34
And I moved down to Victoria and, you know, met a girl.
26:37
I end up, I'm in Victoria still now and I stayed there ever since then.
26:42
And I remember I end up moving to Torquay, which I am still here now.
26:47
And my physio then was a guy in Geelong by the name of Jeff Oxley.
26:51
And I think I had a knee injury.
26:52
I had something going on.
26:54
So I went to the physio and I didn't know much about AFL then because I was, you know, from Sydney.
26:59
And I'm laying in the physio and I'm on one bed and this bloke beside me is on another bed and my physio is going between me and him working on my knee, working on his knee.
27:10
During that time, me and this guy are just having this flat-out conversation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this guy beside me, which was Adler,
27:19
The senior, he goes, oh, yeah, can you take me out on your bike riding?
27:24
I'm going, yeah, mate, no worries.
27:25
Here's my number.
27:26
Just, you know, give me a ring and we'll go out to the Otways or there's a couple of tracks I can take you to, no problem.
27:32
So this went on for an hour or so.
27:35
So eventually he's left and I'm still there.
27:38
My physio comes back and he had this look on his face in horror.
27:42
And he goes, did you know who that was?
27:44
Yeah, Gary.
27:46
He plays for Geelong, right?
27:47
He goes, yeah.
27:48
He says, yeah, but he's like God here, mate.
27:50
Well, they do.
27:51
His nickname is God.
27:53
They said, if you take him out riding and he injures himself, you'll be run out of town with spears.
27:59
So throw that number away and not take his call.
28:03
Cool, yeah.
28:05
While we're talking injuries here, Phil Christensen, who's kind of almost seen as a bit of a godfather figure around Supercross and Supercross promotion and things like that, he had to field some calls in relation to you after you did what I think was
28:22
was an aerobics Oz-style promo shoot thing and it looked, correct me if I'm wrong here, it looked something like there was a crash and most people were worried it was you and were you going to be racing on Saturday night and all sorts, wasn't it?
28:37
Yeah, well, see, in that period, the early 80s, all of a sudden with Phil Christensen started to do all these indoor races.
28:46
You know, Sydney Entertainment Centre, which is gone now.
28:48
Centre, yeah.
28:49
Melbourne, Rod Labor Arena, Boondal in Brisbane, Adelaide Entertainment Centre.
28:55
And we're packing out the places like full house on a Friday night, full house on a Saturday night.
29:00
We do a matinee session on a Sunday.
29:02
So you're talking 20-odd, 25,000 people over the three days.
29:06
So we were kind of the new sort of thing on the block.
29:10
So all the TV networks.
29:12
always coming, wanting to do some sort of promotion, and obviously Phil Christensen being the promoter would welcome that because of the exposure.
29:21
And if people remember back in those days, which was the early 90s or whatever it was then, they used to have all those aerobic shows going on in the morning.
29:29
And I remember this guy, blonde hair guy with a ponytail and blah, blah, blah.
29:33
So he turned up to do this whatever he was doing.
29:37
And then part of the skit they wanted to do was him to ride my bike in my riding gear.
29:44
So he's going, yeah, yeah, no worries.
29:45
I know how to ride a bike.
29:46
I used to ride a bike.
29:47
And when people say that, that's when you worry because they claim themselves or rate themselves.
29:54
And anyway, so, you know, all the gear goes on.
29:57
He gets on my bike, this, that, and the other, and the camera starts rolling.
30:01
He takes off at warp five and just does his big loop out of the bike, cartwheel down the truck.
30:06
I think he broke his collarbone, actually.
30:09
And so that was a big deal, but it all went to air because they wanted, it was good exposure for the event.
30:15
Sure, yeah.
30:16
But the problem was I was the star of the show that they were promoting to bring the crowd in.
30:22
So then Phil was getting all these phone calls going, well, Craig, that's out injured.
30:26
We're all not coming.
30:26
We want our money back.
30:28
Money back.
30:30
It turned out to be a hindrance, not a positive thing in the end.
30:34
Crazy, crazy.
30:36
Motocross or supercross?
30:37
I mean you've done so many diversely different things in your racing career and I'm –
30:42
certain there's, you know, things about each that are, that are greatly appealing.
30:46
But did you, did you love those shows when you're up so close against the crowd and you, you know, you've transformed an arena like, um, Sydney entertainment center, which as you say is gone now.
30:56
And, and I've been to Rod Laver on plenty of occasions and stuff that must feel immensely good.
31:01
Yeah, it was pretty high impact.
31:02
It was, to my era, I had to sort of morph into Supercross.
31:07
So Supercross was emerging through my career.
31:11
So my natural talent was motocross and I had to sort of learn the Supercross way, which I did.
31:18
But the indoors were different again than proper Supercross because I was so small, you could only qualify down to eight riders.
31:26
It's a little bit like Arena Cross basically, wasn't it?
31:29
Yeah, pretty much.
31:29
Yeah.
31:30
And, you know, a normal supercross, you're getting up to 20 to 30 people on the gate.
31:35
So it's quite easy to qualify.
31:36
But you can imagine 20 guys trying to qualify down to eight positions.
31:41
It was, it almost become like, you know,
31:44
It was just manic, you know.
31:46
We just had to smash into people to get people out of the way.
31:48
But it really lifted our sport to the next level.
31:52
You know, it introduced our sport to not only father and son, but the mum and the daughter would come along too because of the comfort of the environment.
32:02
They can go nice, comfortable toilets, nice seating, undercover,
32:07
But the racing was explosive.
32:09
I really enjoyed it because we used to have a lot of Americans come over for it too.
32:13
It became prime time TV viewing.
32:17
And through that period, that's where sort of I really got my name and my notoriety from that era.
32:23
Was it hard to stop the professional racing?
32:27
You merged in the early 90s and created CDR and it's been a success story of more than 30 years as a
32:34
as a race team, I think, and you can tell me if I've got the numbers wrong here, it's like 50 titles or more than that, isn't it?
32:41
I mean, the story's immense.
32:43
We're going to get to this in the second half of the podcast.
32:45
But what about from your professional racing side of things?
32:49
It becomes like a drug, Craig, and it must be enormously hard to shut off, to stop.
32:54
Well, I haven't stopped, you know.
32:56
So when I quit racing myself, that was pretty easy.
33:00
I'd had enough.
33:01
I didn't have – it's not like an injury drove me out and I still felt like I had more into me.
33:06
I just – I had enough.
33:07
I was happy to tap out.
33:10
And then it just morphed into CDR as it is now almost straight away.
33:15
So I still get my fix out of racing like I still did when I raced.
33:22
So when I go to a track now and drive through the gates on a Sunday morning or a Saturday afternoon, whatever it is, I still get that same feeling as when I raced, when I go through the gates.
33:33
But I just don't have that feeling of the injury factor.
33:37
So...
33:38
I still, I don't, from the day I quit racing, I've never missed it, because I get it out of my race team now, and I live vicariously through my riders, of course.
33:54
That's the end of part one of my podcast with Mr. Motocross and Supercross hero Craig Dack.
33:59
While it might feel like the end of his riding journey, the story is about to click another gear.
34:05
Jump back to the library and check out part two when you're ready.
34:09
From starting his own team...
34:11
forging decades-long ties with partners, many that still stand to this day, and chalking up an insane amount of wins as an owner, helping to guide and shape the next generation of riders, including working with a young Chad Reed.
34:27
Oh, and some special bikes from his career that he's kept too.
34:31
It's all ahead here on Rusty's Garage.