Latest / Rusty's Garage / Graeme Crosby (Part 3)

Transcript

Graeme Crosby (Part 3) · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:19
  Rusty here getting ready to go green on the final lap of my chat with Graeme Crosby.
• 0:24
  Here we cover the cool bike restos that he now does, how he turned his hand to touring cars and the shock decision to stop racing bikes when it seemed like there was more in the tank.
• 0:35
  Cros, what a ride.
• 0:40
  This is probably, again, a difficult one to nail down.
• 0:44
  When you look at your career, right, so Suzuka, legendary track for the eight hour.
• 0:50
  We've talked about Le Mans before earlier in the podcast.
• 0:53
  Daytona.
• 0:54
  I've been to Daytona.
• 0:56
  That's hairs on the back of your neck stuff on a motorcycle.
• 1:00
  And then when you look through your results, in the final year of your 500cc racing, there is a podium on the Nordschleife.
• 1:11
  What's the Nordschleife?
• 1:13
  The Nürburgring.
• 1:14
  Oh, no, no, yeah, that was at the end of 1980.
• 1:17
  That was a... 1980, was it?
• 1:18
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:19
  But tell me about that, because to think that you were racing a motorcycle around this 22km daunting track...
• 1:29
  I think they'd stopped Formula One racing there in the mid to sort of, you know, about 1976, and you guys were still there on bikes.
• 1:35
  That's crazy.
• 1:36
  It was crazy.
• 1:37
  In fact, you know, without getting too complicated, my first season in 1980 with the 500, I struggled right through until my birthday, which was in July.
• 1:47
  What clicked?
• 1:52
  For some reason...
• 1:54
  I still can't put it down.
• 1:55
  It was kind of like a self-belief that I can do it.
• 1:58
  And I finished fourth in the Belgium Grand Prix.
• 2:01
  And suddenly it was like, whoa, hang on, I can do this.
• 2:04
  And from there on in, I'd got to grips with the 500.
• 2:09
  Things were more comfortable.
• 2:10
  And once you get one result under your belt, you look forward to the next one.
• 2:15
  Prior to that, of course, you have a seventh or an eighth or a ninth or something like that.
• 2:19
  You're not really looking forward to the next one because you don't want to repeat that.
• 2:24
  So you get a good one under your belt and you suddenly, ah, I can do this.
• 2:29
  And that carried on towards the end of the year until we got to the Nürburgring.
• 2:33
  And I'd been to the Nürburgring the year before to watch, not to race.
• 2:38
  And I'd driven around it a few times.
• 2:41
  So yeah.
• 2:42
  It was a daunting track, like you say, and even the qualifying process, I think I did an eight minutes 30 or something like that, which is pretty quick.
• 2:52
  Let's just put that in perspective.
• 2:54
  22Ks, eight minutes.
• 2:57
  Yeah, I think the record is something like 7-2 or something.
• 3:00
  I can't remember anyway.
• 3:01
  But the point being is that I surprised myself because I think I'm not sure exactly where I qualified.
• 3:08
  I think it was second or third, but it was quite high up.
• 3:12
  And when the race come, Randy had a problem, but Marco Lucanelli disappeared off into the distance and I couldn't catch him.
• 3:20
  But I still finished second and that was like a –
• 3:23
  I really can do this.
• 3:26
  And that really led into the start of 1981 where I had the confidence with a new bike that was as a result of input from Randy and myself into making it lighter and smaller and it just become more personalised instead of an ex-Barry Sheen machine from the year before because that's effectively what I got.
• 3:50
  And having said that,
• 3:53
  you also get with Bowery in 1980 all of his records.
• 3:58
  So for me to turn up at a racetrack I've never been to, we can put Bowery's settings in, and we knew that we were sort of basically there, and I could get on with the job of actually just racing the bike.
• 4:09
  So those are the benefits of it.
• 4:11
  But at the end of that 1980 period...
• 4:14
  going into 81, it was a completely different set of rules because we had different bike and we'd learnt a lot of different things.
• 4:21
  The bikes were, you know, like say quicker and they had different suspension and monoshock and it was a whole new gambit of technical stuff that we had to actually learn.
• 4:33
  It was brilliant.
• 4:34
  But having said that again, I was still doing the Formula One as well.
• 4:38
  So my 81 period was...
• 4:42
  If I look back on the races, it's just an amazing collection of weekend after weekend after weekend after weekend and different racetracks all over the world on different bikes.
• 4:55
  What's the one you cherish, the trophy?
• 4:57
  Daytona, Suzuka 8-hour, TT.
• 5:01
  What's the one for Graeme Crosby?
• 5:05
  I've got two or three of them, and they're called TT trophies.
• 5:09
  Yeah, the TT trophy for sure.
• 5:11
  Like to actually win a TT is... Because you'd dreamed of it, because you'd heard those stories and all that history.
• 5:17
  Well, it is.
• 5:19
  Unless you...
• 5:21
  unless you know nothing about the TT and just turn up there, you'll be absolutely blown away.
• 5:26
  But if you learn about it and you figure out that there's, you know, maybe 100-odd riders go out there and they all want to win and it only happens once a year.
• 5:37
  So it's kind of a, you know, it's a really good feeling to go across that line knowing that you've actually won a TT.
• 5:45
  When you look back on it,
• 5:47
  Your chapter at Grand Prix level and things like that was relatively short compared to others.
• 5:54
  Why did you call time?
• 5:55
  Was it politics?
• 5:57
  Was it BS?
• 5:58
  You'd had enough of the international thing.
• 6:00
  What brought an end to that chapter?
• 6:02
  I guess the ultimate reason for me giving up, and I use the word giving up because I- I don't like that because- No, no.
• 6:11
  It's a terminology because my focus had actually changed a little bit from motorcycles to aviation.
• 6:19
  So what I wanted to do was I wanted to be a pilot.
• 6:21
  Mm-hmm.
• 6:22
  What I forgot is that to be a pilot, you actually have to earn some money to learn how to do it.
• 6:26
  So I should have done it.
• 6:28
  I should have done another year.
• 6:31
  But the real issue was that I didn't see a way – I hate going backwards.
• 6:36
  I would have hated for somebody to say, well, there's no Grand Prix bikes for you.
• 6:41
  Here's a production bike because that would have killed me completely.
• 6:45
  I wouldn't like that at all.
• 6:47
  So when I was confronted at the end of 1981 when I was expecting –
• 6:51
  quite rightly, to go straight into 82 with Suzuki, doing exactly the same thing, Grand Prix's, Formula One.
• 7:00
  And after the 81 season with Suzuki, where I'd had a few pole positions and lap records and,
• 7:08
  I didn't actually win a Grand Prix.
• 7:10
  You'll come to that later probably.
• 7:11
  But anyway, I'll skip over that.
• 7:13
  Plenty of second positions and finishing fifth, I think, in the World Championship that year.
• 7:19
  I had enough confidence to go into 1982 knowing that I didn't have to worry too much about other people because I was on a level playing field with them.
• 7:28
  So when Suzuki came along and said, look, okay, we're going to renegotiate next year.
• 7:34
  The factory will not give you a Grand Prix bike, but they'll give you two Formula One bikes.
• 7:40
  That was a bombshell to me because it was towards the end of the year, it was November.
• 7:45
  There's always that silly season where there's more asses and there are seats available.
• 7:50
  So you always have to be very, very careful and the underlying sort of rumours that were going around that...
• 7:56
  You know, they were looking for English riders and they were looking for this.
• 7:59
  And it kind of made me a bit scary.
• 8:01
  But then when I got called into the office and said, OK, well, we can't give you a Grand Prix bike.
• 8:08
  We can only give you Formula One bikes.
• 8:10
  I was, OK, yep.
• 8:13
  and I just walked away from there.
• 8:17
  And I refused to do the Formula 1 TT Championship because I'd won the British Championship.
• 8:24
  I'd won the World Championship twice for them, and I didn't see the sense in having to go back again.
• 8:30
  I didn't want to be put into a position where I had to go and race at the TT again because I'd been there, done that.
• 8:36
  So I sort of looked at it and went, hmm, okay.
• 8:39
  And then I was in a bit of a quandary on what to do.
• 8:41
  So I needed a bike.
• 8:42
  I know that for 82.
• 8:45
  So I went to, I left them with it on the basis that I was going to Japan.
• 8:50
  I would meet with Suzuki Japan and discuss the, hopefully change their mind.
• 8:57
  So when I get there.
• 8:59
  at the, it was actually at the FIM annual Congress.
• 9:03
  So we had Suzuki in one room, we had Honda in another room and there was a negotiation going between the two of them trying to get my services, which I thought was actually quite good at the time.
• 9:13
  But I was in no headspace at all, honestly, you know, and there was a lot of- What have you done?
• 9:18
  Is that what you're saying?
• 9:19
  Well, no, it wasn't done.
• 9:20
  I just kind of figured that I'd done 40-odd weekends racing and I wanted a holiday.
• 9:25
  I needed to sit back and do nothing and then collect my thoughts and then go forward again.
• 9:30
  But this pressure came on to make a decision whether I had to go with Suzuki's Formula One team only.
• 9:38
  And then as an adjunct to that, they were prepared to give me an inverted brackets factory bike to...
• 9:45
  to go with another team.
• 9:48
  Wink, wink, say no more, you know, it'll have some bits in it, but we're not allowed to give you bits.
• 9:53
  And I was trying to work that one out.
• 9:54
  And what it was, what it turned out to be was that Randy had signed a contract with Suzuki earlier on in the year, well, later on before me, and he had veto over his contract.
• 10:05
  who his co-rider was going to be.
• 10:07
  And obviously it wasn't going to be me because they'd caught themselves out.
• 10:13
  They thought, Suzuki thought that they would have me as another rider, but when they signed that up and then Randy said, no, he wants to have some other person, then I was left cold.
• 10:24
  And they were trying to help me, but it meant that I probably had to set up my own team, which I didn't have the capability or the finance to be able to do that.
• 10:32
  So I had to say no to that.
• 10:34
  And I ran with a Honda offer to take over where Freddie Spencer had left off in Honda America.
• 10:41
  He went Grand Prix racing in 82, was going there full time.
• 10:46
  So it left a spot in Honda America.
• 10:48
  So I agreed to do that.
• 10:50
  Now, this is how stupid it is.
• 10:52
  You imagine you've got head of Honda Racing Corporation there, Gerald Davison, a very astute English gentleman, trying to cajole me to go and ride this bike in America and me going, oh, man, what's the deal?
• 11:09
  What's it going to be?
• 11:09
  And all I could think of, and this is absolutely true, what type of aircraft...
• 11:15
  They would give me to do it.
• 11:17
  So I came up with this aircraft that I felt comfortable with because I had this vision in my mind that, okay, if I can't go Grand Prix racing, I'll race in America and I'll fly to all of the circuits in my little aeroplane.
• 11:31
  At that stage, I hadn't studied geography, obviously, enough to know that it would take you a week to get from one side to the other.
• 11:38
  So I'd actually signed up on this – well, signed up.
• 11:40
  I signed a letter of intent to do it, and the contract was being drawn up that they would provide us with an aircraft.
• 11:48
  Yeah.
• 11:50
  Now, it doesn't happen normally like that, does it?
• 11:53
  So I must have been on drugs or something.
• 11:54
  I don't know.
• 11:55
  But anyway, I signed for it.
• 11:58
  I then went to America to have a look at their setup, and it looked pretty good.
• 12:03
  And I had to take radar with me as well because radar was without a job.
• 12:06
  Radar is Dave Cullen?
• 12:08
  Yep, yep.
• 12:10
  So we went to America and checked all that out and then came back to New Zealand and –
• 12:14
  resigned ourselves to the fact that we'd be going to live in America and do all that.
• 12:18
  So then I got a phone call.
• 12:23
  And the phone call, interestingly enough, the phone call came from Giacomo Agostini.
• 12:31
  And he was kind of obscure up until this time.
• 12:36
  We'd seen him at a couple of racetracks, but, you know, he's the god of motorcycles.
• 12:39
  Legend.
• 12:40
  The legend, yeah.
• 12:41
  I get this phone call, hey, Crosby, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, who's that?
• 12:46
  It's Giacomo Agostini.
• 12:47
  And I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 12:49
  You think it's a gag.
• 12:50
  I thought it was a gag, you know, but anyway, he says, Graham, you know, I want to talk to you about next year.
• 12:57
  Yamaha have come to me and they've given me some motorcycles and I have a new team and your name is one of –
• 13:05
  typical aggo, about 10 riders, and they've approved you as a rider and perhaps maybe Barry Sheen and some other people.
• 13:16
  But we'd like to talk to you about running for the Marlborough Yamaha team, the first one.
• 13:25
  And I thought, oh, God, now what do I do?
• 13:29
  So what I did, I said to him that I would think about it and give him a call back, which I did, and asked him some more questions.
• 13:37
  And I said, okay, if I sign up, then I need to have Radar with me as a mechanic.
• 13:44
  And they agreed to that.
• 13:45
  We agreed to the terms.
• 13:47
  And then I flew off to Italy to sign it, and I got taken to a little place in...
• 13:54
  Lake Como, I think it was, to a guy by the name of Leo de Graffinreid.
• 13:57
  And if I had to know this now, then what I know now, he's the purse strings to Marlborough.
• 14:05
  Like he could just write a check for $2 million just like that.
• 14:09
  And I got paid $100,000 US dollars.
• 14:13
  And that was my sign-on fee.
• 14:16
  So the dream plane, if you'd arced up a little bit more, might have happened.
• 14:20
  Yeah, I know.
• 14:21
  But it was just one of those things.
• 14:23
  So I then was faced with that horrible thing that you had to go back and wriggle your way out of a deal that you'd had a handshake with Gerald Davis.
• 14:31
  And he's a gentleman, of course.
• 14:33
  I had to ring him and explain it, and he wasn't very happy.
• 14:37
  He wouldn't have been happy because he would have already instructed Honda Japan that they'd sign me up.
• 14:42
  So he had to go back on that one, and to this day we're talking just on 40 years.
• 14:46
  I think he's finally forgiven me.
• 14:49
  We shook hands.
• 14:50
  We both checked to make sure we've got the fingers still left, but we've agreed to not discuss that anymore.
• 14:58
  But it's all good.
• 14:58
  Ironically, the season with...
• 15:02
  with Aggo over the entire year was very good for you, wasn't it?
• 15:07
  Oh, ultimately, yeah.
• 15:08
  I finished up second in a world championship and, you know, pole positions and lap records and...
• 15:14
  But underneath that, there was a situation where, you imagine setting up a brand new team.
• 15:22
  I mean, or you know about the car racing, it's bloody expensive.
• 15:26
  Well, this is the way I think about it, and I've always thought about it this way, is that Marlborough have probably got a financial year, and it probably starts in March or something, or April 1st or something like that.
• 15:42
  The deal put together by Aggo and Marlborough began probably six months before that.
• 15:50
  So Aggo didn't have his claws on any money until probably March.
• 15:55
  So when we...
• 15:57
  Turned up in Italy, we had absolutely nothing.
• 16:01
  There was Radar, myself, and we got Trevor Tilbury, who was Kenny Roberts' old mechanic.
• 16:08
  So we had two really good mechanics.
• 16:10
  It was myself and another rider as a team rider, which you may know, I'm not sure if you do, but Graziano Rossi.
• 16:19
  Valentino's dad.
• 16:21
  Valentino's dad, yeah.
• 16:22
  So that was the team.
• 16:23
  It was Valentino, Graziano and myself and Radar and Mick and another Italian mechanic for Graziano.
• 16:34
  And the emphasis was pretty, what would you call it, evident straight away that the
• 16:43
  the coffee machine and the, what would you call it?
• 16:49
  The impetus.
• 16:50
  The, what do they call those things?
• 16:52
  The hospitality truck.
• 16:53
  Yeah, yeah.
• 16:54
  That was primo.
• 16:55
  So Eggo took me away and showed me where the truck's going to be built and all that sort of stuff.
• 17:01
  and the coffee machine was installed in this thing, which was brilliant.
• 17:06
  So I'm sitting there thinking to myself, where's the toolbox?
• 17:09
  Where's the workshop?
• 17:11
  Where's the bikes?
• 17:12
  All I was interested in was this hospitality vehicle.
• 17:17
  And over a short period of time, it all sort of came together.
• 17:22
  But when you've got a Grand Prix mechanic turning up with a –
• 17:26
  with an XS750 toolbox out of a brand new XS750 just as a toolkit, you know, the little ones that go under the seat.
• 17:34
  That's what we started with.
• 17:35
  Whoa.
• 17:36
  That was it.
• 17:37
  And then we felt like we had to beg, borrow, steal to be able to even build up a toolbox to be able to work on the bikes.
• 17:45
  So right from the word go, it was kind of a sticky situation.
• 17:48
  Aggo was more involved in... Fultures, yeah.
• 17:52
  Well, he was doing property development at that stage and he'd allocated the kind of liaison between the team and himself to his brother, Felice.
• 18:03
  And Felice was kind of, he couldn't say yes or anything.
• 18:07
  You know, we were always having to ask him to ask Aggo.
• 18:11
  So it became a bit tenuous there for a while.
• 18:13
  Trevor ended up leaving.
• 18:15
  Radar and I continued.
• 18:17
  Um, but there were some things that happened during the year that, that, that kind of, you know, finished me off completely.
• 18:23
  And one of them or two of them on two occasions, the bike that we were preparing for the Grand Prix, uh, was used unknowingly from, from us.
• 18:32
  We didn't know, but Graziano wrote it in the, uh, Italian Grand Prix, uh, you know, the local national event.
• 18:38
  Um, I didn't know it at all, but when you prepare a GP bike, you know, there's a lot of data that needs to be.
• 18:44
  sort of correlated and put all together to make sure that you're not going to run an old crankshaft.
• 18:49
  You need to have enough kilometres on each component to make sure it doesn't fail.
• 18:53
  It's off doing non-championship stuff, which worries you.
• 18:55
  Yeah, on my bike.
• 18:57
  And I didn't know.
• 18:58
  He didn't ask me.
• 18:59
  It would have been different if they had said, okay, look, Graziano wants to do a national, can we borrow a bike?
• 19:03
  I would have said, yep, take the training bike.
• 19:06
  And we would have worked out a maintenance program that would
• 19:11
  the Grand Prix season.
• 19:12
  But when you're limited on parts and it gets used for some other event, it made it quite difficult.
• 19:18
  So I was a bit pissed off about that, as you can imagine.
• 19:20
  Radar was even more pissed off because he had to prepare it twice.
• 19:24
  So that actually happened on two different occasions.
• 19:28
  Towards the end of the year, I mean, Aggo was actually very good when he wanted to be good there, you know, where the people were around him and he'd, you know, jerry me up and he'd say, right, this is a go.
• 19:40
  We need to, you know, how's your gearing?
• 19:41
  And I'd say, I've done that.
• 19:42
  And he'd say, you need another tooth on the back because we want you to be at 10,000, 11 or 10,000,
• 19:49
  you know, maybe 11,000 RPM just as you're getting into that breaking zone, just enough to be able to carry it past somebody.
• 19:55
  And he'd get me all fired up and we'd go and do it and it would work.
• 19:58
  So his experience came through.
• 20:01
  But when you get that other side of it, which is the kind of, you know, A team, B team and, you know, the miscommunication, it become, you know, pretty intolerable.
• 20:23
  The Kawasaki Z1 is a four-cylinder air-cooled double overhead camshaft carbureted chain-drive motorcycle.
• 20:31
  Introduced in 1972, the Z1 helped popularize the inline across the frame four-cylinder, a format that became known as the Universal Japanese Motorcycle, or UJM.
• 20:44
  I have no idea what I just said.
• 20:46
  Sounded impressive though, right?
• 20:49
  When did you stop the two wheel stuff and how difficult was it to stop in a racing sense?
• 20:54
  You're still involved in a business sense now with bikes.
• 20:56
  You love it.
• 20:57
  Yeah.
• 20:58
  But the racing, when did you stop and why?
• 21:00
  Well, I finished up in 82 at the end of the season.
• 21:03
  I just walked out and that was it.
• 21:04
  That's it.
• 21:05
  Well, that was not quite it because there were some really good paying jobs coming up.
• 21:09
  You know, like the eight hour, they always paid me good money to do that.
• 21:12
  So I continued to do some races in Japan mainly.
• 21:16
  I did the Castrol six hour race in Australia.
• 21:19
  And again, they were kind of easy races.
• 21:22
  They weren't too bad.
• 21:24
  But...
• 21:25
  I think it was at one of the races in Japan, about 87 or something like that, that I was going down the back straight, coming out of Spoon Corner.
• 21:33
  It's a long straight.
• 21:35
  And I was thinking to myself, what the hell am I going to do for dinner tonight?
• 21:39
  And if you start thinking what you're going to be doing- That's a firm corner.
• 21:43
  On the long straight before this huge, big, high-speed left-hand corner, and I'm trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to do for dinner.
• 21:51
  Everything was automated in that stage because my riding career had become that way.
• 21:54
  You know, it just becomes a mechanical thing you just do.
• 21:58
  But the brain's got to be engaged as well.
• 22:00
  And I was getting a disconnect.
• 22:02
  And that to me was the time, uh-uh, I'm done.
• 22:06
  I've got to get out.
• 22:08
  I've got to get out.
• 22:09
  And that's pretty much when I decided that was it.
• 22:12
  So you talked before about going flying for a little bit.
• 22:15
  You did that in a commercial sense.
• 22:17
  And then in the mid-80s, you would take up some touring car racing.
• 22:21
  The thing that springs to mind for me is
• 22:24
  working with the legendary Stone Brothers, who Australian audience members will know very well from Marcus Ambrose, Russell Ingle.
• 22:33
  But that's the Ford chapter.
• 22:35
  You drove a VK Commodore with these guys.
• 22:37
  God, it sounds like an old 65 Skoda, doesn't it?
• 22:40
  It's not quite as bad as that.
• 22:43
  Interestingly enough, you know, it was in 85, I think it was, I got an invitation to run in the Benson and Hedges race, which you may know at Pukakau, it's about a 500k race or something.
• 22:55
  And I got to drive a Tredia.
• 22:58
  you know, like a Mitsubishi Tredia turbo thing.
• 23:01
  And because it was, I don't know why, but I decided I'd have a go at it.
• 23:06
  And I went out there.
• 23:07
  I remember going down the straight at Pukekohe the first time in this Tredia, kind of going, oh, yeah, okay, well, okay, is there any more gears or anything like that?
• 23:15
  But there wasn't.
• 23:15
  Anyway, I went into that big champion curve at the end there, and I flicked it in.
• 23:21
  And there was a little bit of oversteer, which I failed to correct.
• 23:25
  And I kind of put the nose on the railings and it followed it all the way around the corner.
• 23:30
  The actual racetrack went off to the left.
• 23:32
  I was on the grass with my nose stuck on the railings and spun it out.
• 23:36
  That was the only problem we had with that.
• 23:38
  But I got back into it again.
• 23:40
  We did that, but the brakes failed.
• 23:41
  But it was enough to say, hmm, I don't get gravel rash.
• 23:47
  You might crash, it doesn't matter.
• 23:49
  But a lot of bike guys struggle with the fact that it doesn't give the same sensation as a 500cc machine, as an Isle of Man TT machine.
• 23:58
  It's good, but it never quite gives you that same buzz.
• 24:02
  Did you struggle with that or you just went, oh, no, this is what it's like and...
• 24:07
  No, that's exactly the – but you can't expect a car to feel like a Grand Prix bike.
• 24:15
  There's just no way in the world.
• 24:17
  But what we had to deal with was the lateral G-forces.
• 24:21
  which we'd never encompassed, you know, with one counted because motorbikes don't have lateral movement.
• 24:27
  They have vertical component all the time.
• 24:30
  So suddenly I'm going around a corner, you know, with one hand on the steering wheel hanging onto the doorpost, you know, going, oh, bit of sideways forces here, that type of thing, you know.
• 24:38
  But it didn't take much to get up to speed with that.
• 24:42
  But it was enough to say to me, okay, we need to,
• 24:45
  to do something a bit more aggressive, I suppose, and shoot for the stars.
• 24:51
  So I got presented with a 6.35 BMW to run.
• 24:56
  I mean, that's a big step from a Tredia straight to a Frank Sitner 6.35 CSI thing.
• 25:05
  So we ran that at the 85 Wellington Street Race.
• 25:12
  And I drove with another New Zealander.
• 25:15
  And I think we actually ended up, I'm not exactly sure how it works, but cumulatively over both races, I think we finished third in the Nissan Mobile series.
• 25:25
  But in Wellington, it rained.
• 25:28
  And, again, it was like on slicks, man, that thing just came back with not one straight panel on it.
• 25:35
  Every corner was knocked off, but it kept going, albeit on five cylinders, and we finished the race.
• 25:41
  And, oh, this is good fun.
• 25:44
  And again, you're not endangering yourself.
• 25:49
  I put the danger level way, way, way, way down the scale because in a car you don't hear of people getting killed so much in motor racing anyway.
• 26:00
  And that was enough to stupidly decide, right, okay.
• 26:06
  I'm off to Aussie.
• 26:06
  I'm going to take on these Australians.
• 26:08
  And I picked the best year, 1987, 86, 87, which was the financial crisis problem.
• 26:14
  So cars were easy to buy.
• 26:18
  So at that stage, Ray Smith...
• 26:23
  a New Zealand Auckland coin and bullion dealer, had bought a car off Peter Brock, and Ross Stone had gone across and built it for him and Denny Holm to drive.
• 26:38
  And they did one race.
• 26:39
  I think they did Bathurst, I think, and a gear lever broke, and then they did another race and the gear lever broke again.
• 26:46
  And that was it.
• 26:47
  They didn't do any more races.
• 26:48
  So the car was available.
• 26:50
  It was available in New Zealand.
• 26:52
  It came with a transporter, and I'd managed to find somebody to fund it, well, half of it, and I was going racing.
• 27:01
  And the good part was that, because it had come from Australia to New Zealand, the deal was that it could go back to Australia without any costs.
• 27:08
  So I wasn't up for any huge, big upfront costs.
• 27:11
  So we moved to Melbourne and set up a Calder Raceway with Ross Stone and Jimmy Stone.
• 27:18
  And Ross single-handedly sort of guided me through that whole year.
• 27:25
  Brilliant guy, absolutely brilliant.
• 27:26
  And probably looking back, I was a bit too kind of laissez-faire about it, I think.
• 27:33
  And I think I may have had the talent, but I didn't put it to good use, according to him.
• 27:39
  He's too nice.
• 27:41
  But I think he recalls you going to a race in Adelaide where you –
• 27:47
  may have gone out the evening before, had a bit of fun, turned up with very limited sleep.
• 27:55
  But ironically, you went like a scalded cat, didn't you?
• 27:59
  Yeah, that was the 86 Adelaide GP, the touring car championship race there.
• 28:04
  And I think I'd qualified third, maybe second or third or something.
• 28:09
  There was some consternation about where is he, is he turning up?
• 28:12
  You know, you were kind of a bit MIA, weren't you?
• 28:15
  Well, yeah, I was missing in action.
• 28:18
  And the reason was that I'd hooked up with an ex-motorbike fan that also was Mike Harwood's friend, and he took me into Adelaide and introduced me to some of their finer wines.
• 28:31
  It was a quiet night then.
• 28:33
  It was a quiet night.
• 28:34
  I turned up in the morning not feeling too brilliant, but actually to be fair.
• 28:38
  And the race started and I, you know, very quickly worked my way backwards.
• 28:44
  And then for some reason...
• 28:47
  it just all kicked in again and away I went.
• 28:50
  I should have actually won that race, honestly.
• 28:51
  I should have won that race.
• 28:53
  And Ross Stone says the same thing.
• 28:56
  He wasn't impressed with me, to say the least.
• 28:59
  There is, if you go looking on YouTube, there is some cool vision of you driving that car
• 29:06
  Only a handful of people can do it well, in my opinion.
• 29:10
  So Dick Johnson can do it.
• 29:11
  Neil Crompton can do it.
• 29:13
  And there was a race, I think, at Calder where Mike Raymond and the commentary team crossed you and chatted to you as you were racing.
• 29:20
  Did that stuff come – I mean, we talked earlier in the podcast here.
• 29:24
  You figured out very early that –
• 29:26
  that in your interview technique, in whatever it was, you needed to show a bit of character.
• 29:31
  And so it was with these onboard crosses live in the car.
• 29:35
  You would often have a giggle, wouldn't you?
• 29:38
  Oh, yeah.
• 29:38
  I quite enjoyed those things.
• 29:39
  But, again, you go back in those days, you've got a camera that weighs about 85 kilos, and it does pan around sort of, you know, you've got to be a bit careful, it doesn't knock you on the head.
• 29:50
  But the concept of in-car camera,
• 29:53
  was kind of in its infancy in those days.
• 29:56
  And, of course, Dick Johnson's perfect.
• 29:58
  You know, he can roll them off his tongue all the time.
• 30:02
  I was slightly different because I wasn't pushing the technical side, you know, where if you gave it to Peter Brock, he'd be –
• 30:11
  busy as in the cockpit and he'd be talking about wanting to adjust the brake bias or do this or do something like that.
• 30:18
  I was the other way going.
• 30:20
  It's a bit taily at the back, I think.
• 30:22
  Hang on, I'll have a look.
• 30:22
  Oh, yep, I left a black mark out the back.
• 30:24
  Yep, that's, and that type of thing, it was kind of a way of dealing with it.
• 30:29
  And I think the-
• 30:31
  the key to that particular one was when they asked me to, you know, what do you do?
• 30:35
  And I said, well, I just run across the instruments, you know.
• 30:37
  I've got, well, I don't have a speedo and I'm looking for things, you know.
• 30:42
  And there was a thing called, oh, I don't know, there was WT or something.
• 30:45
  Oh, that's a water temperature.
• 30:46
  That's okay.
• 30:47
  That's cool.
• 30:48
  And I think there's one over there, GB.
• 30:50
  Oh, that must be the glove box temperature.
• 30:53
  Yeah, that type of thing.
• 30:54
  So I was just taking the piss out of it really.
• 30:55
  But it was, it actually worked kind of.
• 30:59
  kind of quite well but having said that again the issue you've got there is the australians dictate kind of who gets the television camera and in a commercial sense uh there was no advantage for me because i didn't have any big sponsors that were able to kind of support it and that whole year became a a sort of a cost um you know a huge cost to us
• 31:23
  I want to, we've had a giggle here, right?
• 31:25
  But I want to sort of underscore how well you went in both spheres, right?
• 31:29
  Be it two wheel or four wheel.
• 31:31
  There is on your CV a New Zealand Turing car championship win, which I think is massive.
• 31:37
  And you did it in an iconic car.
• 31:40
  The Sierra RS500 Cosworth, it's come up a number of times in the podcast.
• 31:45
  It is amazing.
• 31:47
  legendary car, not easily mastered.
• 31:51
  What was it like to drive that thing and to chalk that up back home where it all started for you?
• 31:57
  Oh, look, I've got one story to tell that it's terrible.
• 32:00
  And I feel so gutted.
• 32:03
  I got this call from Colin Bond, actually, to say, look, we need a second driver for Bathurst.
• 32:10
  And I'm going, what?
• 32:12
  Shit, this is all right.
• 32:12
  This is good.
• 32:14
  I've seen those RSs go.
• 32:15
  They're bloody quick.
• 32:17
  And I thought, oh, that'll be really good.
• 32:18
  So he invited me to fly over to Orem Park to do some testing.
• 32:24
  So I went out there and they'd finished the car.
• 32:26
  This was probably only about three weeks before Bathurst.
• 32:30
  And the car was great.
• 32:32
  And we had to do some running in and run some brakes and bits and pieces.
• 32:35
  And we're out at Amarou Park and I'm scooting around there on this thing.
• 32:38
  And they're a nervous car.
• 32:39
  And when I say nervous, it's kind of...
• 32:42
  And it's kind of a, they sit quite high off the ground.
• 32:45
  They shorten the wheelbase.
• 32:46
  And they're not a big soft thing.
• 32:49
  You know, they're very nervous.
• 32:52
  And I sort of kind of got used to that and the way in which the turbos operate.
• 32:57
  You know, you can either have huge amounts of boost and then, you know, low compression or high compression and low boost.
• 33:04
  You know, there's two ways to do it.
• 33:05
  John Bauer talked about,
• 33:08
  getting on the gas and waiting for it to spool up.
• 33:11
  You kind of have to anticipate when it would kick in.
• 33:14
  Yeah, well, he's got the one with the big boost.
• 33:16
  That's exactly what happens, yeah.
• 33:17
  You know, you've got to anticipate it.
• 33:20
  You know, you really have to.
• 33:21
  And whether you have to, like, try and carry turbo spin going into the corner, which is, you know, you'd keep dabbing the throttle to keep it spinning.
• 33:29
  So when you do hit it, it's there.
• 33:30
  But towards the end of the practice session, a big black cloud came over.
• 33:37
  And I'm going down the straight and one drop of rain, you know, about the size of a bucket.
• 33:43
  And it was just a thunderstorm came down.
• 33:46
  And I slowed down to what I thought was a safe speed.
• 33:50
  And then it hailed.
• 33:52
  And the hailstones were huge.
• 33:54
  And I was working my way around the track.
• 33:56
  And I just, you go through the S's, I think it is.
• 34:00
  And there's a little left-hander that takes you up to the flip-flop, what we call the flip-flop.
• 34:05
  And I just turned the wheel a little bit and it sat on those ice cubes and took me straight into the fence and just took a corner out of the front of this car.
• 34:13
  And I'm going, oh, my God, I'm so embarrassed about it.
• 34:17
  It's still, you know, there's nothing you can do.
• 34:20
  And it took such a long time to get to that fence.
• 34:23
  It was just like, oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, no, no, no.
• 34:25
  Please, no, no, no, no, no.
• 34:27
  Bang.
• 34:28
  So they fixed it anyway and we took it to Bathurst.
• 34:30
  And, yeah, it was a good car.
• 34:34
  Good at Bathurst.
• 34:34
  Quick.
• 34:35
  But there's other guys out there too that are running those things.
• 34:38
  So it was competitive.
• 34:39
  It was good fun.
• 34:41
  You've been very kind to have me here today.
• 34:44
  Where you are is north of Auckland.
• 34:46
  You still love the bike game now, which I think is fantastic.
• 34:51
  And you are breathing life back into all sorts of bikes, particularly the Kawasaki Z range.
• 34:57
  Tell us more about this venture and some of the cool Japanese restos that you are doing.
• 35:03
  Oh, look, when I came back to New Zealand after I was racing motorbikes, I ended up buying a motorbike shop.
• 35:10
  and then spent 12 years trying to get out of it.
• 35:13
  Honestly, it was just not me at all.
• 35:15
  But eventually I got out of it and I did some other things.
• 35:18
  And when we come up to live in Matacana, somebody – oh, there was a guy – that's right, a guy just down the road.
• 35:25
  He had a couple of Z1s, and they're my favourite bike.
• 35:29
  So sweet, cool-looking.
• 35:31
  As an apprentice, I used to assemble them out of the box, so it kind of had an affinity with them straight away.
• 35:36
  So I bought two of these bikes, and I made one good one out of it.
• 35:41
  And while I was doing it, somebody came along and said,
• 35:44
  I like that.
• 35:44
  Could you do a little bit more?
• 35:46
  And now I've got 15-odd bikes on the go at the moment.
• 35:50
  Love it.
• 35:51
  Some roads, some race.
• 35:53
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, just across the board.
• 35:56
  But the basic, the business that I've built is really taking the Z1s from basket cases, breathing new life back into them, and giving them another opportunity in somebody else's hands to ride as effectively a brand-new bike because we strip them right down and we rebuild them so they've got zero...
• 36:14
  time on them and away they go.
• 36:15
  So I've been doing that now for probably five or six years now.
• 36:18
  And we've just been gradually doing maybe two a year or three a year.
• 36:24
  And then part of that also is some of the requirements that customers come to me and they say, look...
• 36:31
  build me a hot rod.
• 36:32
  And I'm going, oh God, here we go.
• 36:34
  So I get my book out and I go, okay, what sort of swing arm do you want?
• 36:39
  You want a chrome one or a black one or whatever it is?
• 36:41
  So you go through kind of a wishlist and suddenly it's a really enjoyable thing to be able to pull these parts and assemble them all together and create these, what I'd call neo-classic style bikes, you know, where you take an old bike and
• 36:55
  And it's a blend of the new and the old.
• 36:58
  So you can take an old thing with basic suspension and put late model suspension and good brakes on it and then tune up the engine and put a good, you know, I don't know, titanium exhaust and, you know, different paint work on it and away they go.
• 37:13
  So that's really cool.
• 37:14
  So I've been doing quite a few of those.
• 37:16
  I'm also doing taking the new bike, the brand new bike, and making that more into a classic style by having, instead of having a four into one like they normally have with a big, some sort of box underneath to stop the gases in this BC world, we get rid of all that and put four straight pipes on it and make it more like the classic 70s look, repaint them and brand them and do that.
• 37:43
  So that's another arm to it.
• 37:45
  And then finally, what we end up doing is looking at replica bikes.
• 37:50
  In other words, taking a bike from the 80s and having a picture of it from different sides, researching it, getting as much information and digital kind of data on them, and then starting from scratch and making them.
• 38:05
  So you take an old bike, like a GS1000, for example, that we're doing at the moment, and we remake it exactly as it was back in the 80s.
• 38:15
  And these things aren't cheap.
• 38:16
  They do cost a lot of money.
• 38:17
  But so far, I've done a Wayne Gardner replica, a Graham Crosby replica, an Eddie Lawson replica.
• 38:23
  I've done a Wes Cooley one.
• 38:26
  I'm doing a Freddie Spencer one at the moment and a Graham Crosby Daytona super bike, winning bike.
• 38:36
  But that one's to a Japanese customer.
• 38:39
  And I've done quite a lot to Japanese people and to English people.
• 38:44
  So those are the sort of things that kind of inspire me to do it.
• 38:47
  And there's plenty of work out there if you want to do it.
• 38:51
  I'm just really enjoying it.
• 38:52
  I'm glad you are.
• 38:54
  The worldwide interest is phenomenal.
• 38:56
  If you want to go and have a look, grahamcrosby.co.nz, and it'll blow your mind some of the beautiful bikes that are in there.
• 39:03
  Very hard to think of Graeme Crosby without thinking of Kawasaki, without thinking of Morawake.
• 39:09
  Is there a bike in your career that is the bike?
• 39:13
  Which is the one that you look back on fondly?
• 39:17
  I'd like to say a Morawaki or something like that, but an RG500.
• 39:22
  Okay.
• 39:23
  It's got to be an 80, yeah, Suzuki 81 GP bike is kind of that, it's a classic iconic Grand Prix bike that was virtually perfect in its day.
• 39:36
  And the reason why I say that is because I ran that in 1981 and it was pretty damn good.
• 39:40
  I mean, Uncini won the world championship on one,
• 39:47
  But when I rode with Yamaha, there was a distinct difference between – it was kind of like the Yamaha was just nowhere near the Suzuki until we took all of the data off the Suzuki and transformed all of those measurements and we cut things and welded things and made the OW60 factory bike from 1982 pretty much the same dimensions as the RG from 81.
• 40:14
  And it worked.
• 40:15
  Amazing.
• 40:16
  It was brilliant.
• 40:17
  Yeah, but the 81 GP bike from Suzuki was probably my favourite.
• 40:21
  Hard to nail down because you've succeeded at Daytona.
• 40:25
  You have ridden some iconic tracks around the world, TT included, Isle of Man.
• 40:30
  Is it the Isle of Man that is the track for you or the circuit or the place?
• 40:35
  I think where I am at the moment, I would probably have to be one of the luckiest people that have ever been to the TT.
• 40:43
  And the reason I say that is that I went there from, I did a 79, 80 and 81.
• 40:47
  That's three years and I won three TTs and a second and a fourth or something else.
• 40:53
  If you look at the record, it's pretty good.
• 40:57
  But dare I say it, I don't think I'd ever like to have – I didn't want to race there in 82 because I'd been there, done that, and it's an unforgiving track.
• 41:09
  It's not – how can I say it?
• 41:13
  It will take whoever it does.
• 41:15
  There's no rhyme nor reason.
• 41:17
  You could be there one day and go on the next.
• 41:19
  It's not selective.
• 41:20
  It just happens.
• 41:23
  To be fair, I don't even know why or how it can still go with so much of the danger side, but maybe that's where it lies.
• 41:31
  That's the last bastion of the ability of somebody to put man and machine together without the regulatory people wanting to keep them safe.
• 41:40
  It's been fantastic to come and talk to you.
• 41:43
  Thank you very much for having me.
• 41:46
  I love the fact that someone with a childhood passion has gone on to conquer the world in so many different areas of motorcycle racing.
• 41:56
  And all these years later in your 60s, you still love it like a 17-year-old, mate.
• 42:02
  I think that's just phenomenal.
• 42:03
  You're still living it.
• 42:04
  Oh, yeah, I get to ride the best bikes too.
• 42:07
  And I shouldn't say it, but there's some streets around here that, you know, get worked out pretty good.
• 42:12
  We love the teerstrokes.
• 42:13
  Thank you, mate.
• 42:13
  Congratulations.
• 42:14
  Cheers.
• 42:14
  Thank you.
• 42:19
  Rusty's Garage is written and presented by me, Greg Rust.
• 42:24
  Series producer and editor is Alex Mitchell.
• 42:27
  Audio production by Darcy Thompson.
• 42:37
  Listener.