Going Down Under
By Shawn McDonald
This is the story of just one of five racers and six support people who traveled to the southern hemisphere to compete in five races of the New Zealand National Road Racing Championships in December 1990 and January 1991.
Team America, consisting of the juvenile and not so juvenile derelict racers Bruce Lind (Captain America), Steve Dahlstrom, Mike Sullivan, Troy Burstyk and myself, arrived in the quaint New Zealand town of Wanganui (Waaangnoohhii) two days before Christmas. The Santa Claus and his Reindeer arrival temperature was in the 80s (about 30 Centigrade), and it was sunny. You may remember the northwest was suffering the monster 1989 snowstorm that made International news and left most of you stranded. We, of course, all missed America and the snowstorms as we drove through the green pastoral lands of New Zealand, while passing Kiwi Lagers and getting totally pissed, mate.
Bruce, Steve, Troy and I settled down just outside of town at the promoter, Don Cosford’s house, while Mike stayed with the village constable Tony, and his family. The three bachelors were cordoned off in a 1960 converted bus just outside the house. Troy and I slept on the couches, if that’s what you could call them, while Dahlstrom stayed in the back of the bus in a private room with a door. It wasn’t that Troy and I were that friendly, it was that the bedroom and closed door slightly muted the sound of the most horrific snorer this side of the Pecos. When Troy’s girlfriend joined us later on in the trip they took over the bedroom, and left me defenseless to the rumblings of death, except for a couple of pillows to stuff my ears with or to throw at Steve when my ears started to bleed. I found a new use for racing earplugs, and that was to shove them up Steve’s nose.
They raise close to 60 million sheep in New Zealand, or 20 sheep per person (sheep jokes are mandatory way of life while driving in a van full of racers), but Don Cosford was closer to being a swine in sheep’s clothing. Think of the Blues Brothers movie where ‘Joliet’ Jake Blues turns to a family sitting down at a table in a restaurant and, in a foreign accent, asks the father, “How much for the little girl?” – you are just scratching the surface of the true Cosford. To give the swine credit, he did work with Bruce on setting up our five-week road trip down under to race five out of the six National Championship rounds.
One of the prerequisites for competing in the New Zealand championships was for each rider on our stopover in Hawaii to buy a fifth of Jack Daniels at the duty free shop for Cosford. If there was no JD in our hands there would be no racing, or so we were threatened. He would mix it half and half with Coke and start sipping it at 5am, and would finally stop when he fell asleep in his chair at midnight. All those Jack Daniels disappeared within the first week. Cosford was generous enough that he offered to set us up in the best brothels in Wanganui with the finest girls, if we wanted. We didn’t want to. Cosford was a multi-time National Sidecar Speedway Champion, the promoter of the Wanganui Cemetery Street Circuit National road race and not a bad bloke after all was said, and one with a great family. He was certainly a character no one who has crossed his path will ever forget.
The Cemetery Street Circuit is well named, as it runs through the heart of town and into a cemetery that stopped accepting candidates in the 1920s. Remember that a cemetery is unlike a prison in that people are dying to get in. The circuit starts on the main street, with a small straight that leads to the first cross street where you turn right at 90 degrees. Gas it, shift up twice, brake and take another 90-degree right corner and head down the main straightaway. You get used to the 90-degree turns, because that’s the way the streets are laid out. When it rains in New Zealand it rains really hard. To get all that water off the road and down the drainage real fast the streets have a very steep down slope (or camber) on both sides of the center stripe. For the racer that meant you entered a corner in a steep on-camber position, and exited in a steep off-camber position. When you crested the top of the street you could pull a wheelie with a little cross-up thrown in to thrill yourself and the crowds. I only did mine by accident. “Whoaaa, get down boy. No more of that, do you hear!” The main straight was long as it ran next to a river, and you could click it up to sixth gear and look over at the K-Mart shoppers as you passed by.
Just before entering into the holy sanctuary of the cemetery at the end of the straight you had to cross the famous railroad tracks. Your hand was bending the brake lever, as you were hard on the brakes when your tires crossed these shiny bands of bumpy steel.
Every year since 1952, an estimated 10 to 15 thousand people have attended this Boxing Day event (English holiday, the day after Christmas). Many of these spectators watched by hanging off, or sitting on, the gargantuan tombstones that stood up to ten feet high, bestowing an owner’s box view as the riders entered the uphill right, left, right esses through the valley of death. After you had feared no evil, you pointed straight towards the flower garden, then braked and yanked it hard to the right for a 120-degree turn. If you missed the braking markers you were most likely pushing up daises – daises and roses were planted in the garden. Oh, you thought I meant something else. Silly bugger! Accelerating hard with a blip of the throttle, you leaned it left to cross the Bridge of Sighs and then the finish line.
Now do that 20 times alongside 60 bikes with curbs, light poles, hay bales, street signs and brick buildings to hit at the edge of the track, and no run-off room at all. Now do it again, and again. The bridge was scary, because trains ran under it and there was a fair amount of uncontrolled drop if you made a mistake. Many a rear tire slid to the curb of the bridge and crashed the bike.
You knew all these immoveable objects were well padded with hay bales, but they were just hay bales after all, and weren’t supposed to save your life. The consequences of making a mistake on this street race were much greater than on a specially built racetrack. There was always that thought that you could die on this track, people had before and would again. The question was would it be you?
The crowds sitting at the corners to watch the races, with their caskets of ice and beer, delighted in their morbidity. They wandered through our Team America pits and watched as Sullivan applied ice to his swollen ankle after a practice crash on the bridge. If you caught the first issue of Bench Racer you saw a picture of one of our Wanganui hosts, Owen Sutter, flipping his sidecar off the bridge in the 1960s. If that wasn’t enough damage to Sutter’s pride, Dahlstrom successfully chased down his daughter Leann.
All of Team America raced in the Formula II class after we had been incorrectly advised our Yamaha FZR 600s would be legal in the New Zealand production class by that swine Cosford. Wrong! Sullivan was fine, since he had actually brought a Yamaha TZ250 with him. Troy was the only one to scrounge up a stock shock, fork springs, brake lines and oil cooler to muster tech inspection, even with a few Kiwis grumbling loudly in the background. Something about kill the Yanks and burn the Yanks was heard, but not confirmed and verified.
That gave the young and brave Troy twice the amount of track time as anybody else on Team America, since he could race in the production and F-II classes. Track time was essential on this course as the only practice was the morning of race day. Learn real fast, or go real slow. Dahlstrom and I started near the back, because of the first race results in Auckland where I didn’t even finish. Sullivan took off on his injured ankle and battled with international racing star Robert Holden (killed at the ultimate street race, the Isle of Man, a few years later), on his V-Twin 600 Ducati Pantah with its aluminum perimeter frame, a nitro methane-fueled superbike, and F-II champion Mike Webb (current factory Yamaha GP mechanic to the GP Moto series) on another TZ. When the Ducati passed by your eyes would start to water as the toxic fumes burned into your pupils.
Bruce, with his track knowledge – he’d raced the track three previous times – was going for top production-based four stroke in eighth place, while Troy stayed steady in tenth spot, putting his extra track time to his advantage. Where were Dahlstrom and myself? We were in mid-pack, about 14th and 15th place, battling the motocross bikes with big disc brakes. I was leading going into the flower garden when the rider directly ahead of me crashed under braking. There was nowhere to go except over his rear wheel. As I styled in a slight cross-up while flying through the air, Dahlstrom took the opportunity to pass me, as I had to turn around and find the course again. No I didn’t crash; after all I was a past Bozocrosser. Seeing Steve in front of me got my juices flowing again, as I tracked him down and repassed him.
The thing about racing a street circuit is that if you try to hang it all out you will go slower and probably crash. The secret is to ride under extreme control and at 90 per cent throttle, like an endurance race. Sullivan finished in third place, while Bruce and Troy placed eighth and tenth. Steve and I were fairly depressed at showing this huge Kiwi crowd just how bad some of Team America really was. Then quite a few riders and spectators came up to us and congratulated us on our excellent finishes. Steve and I looked at each other in total amazement, with our mouths hitting our chests. According to Kiwi standards we did pretty good for some blokes who had never seen the track or had raced on the street before. After we signed some autographs we did what we always did after the race, packed five race bikes and every bolt and nut we could find onto the trailer. Then we drove a whopping mile and a half to Cosford’s house.
That night there was a huge piss-up at Cosford’s house as about 70 to 80 racers, support people and track workers showed up to consume gargantuan amounts of beer. Fact #1, New Zealand has the highest per capita amount of beer thrown down the throat than anyplace in the world. Fact #2, the beer in NZ is about five percent alcohol. Fact #3, there are tons of microbreweries there. Fact #4, they have Super Liquor Man stores where you can drive through to pick up your tinnies. I am talking PARTY! The night quickly fades from my memory. I remember a group of NZ racers and their friends hanging out in the kitchen, completely smashed. Strangely enough, with their NZ accents combined with the slurred speech of too much drink, they started to sound like Yanks and I could understand them.
Out on the back patio music was playing, and people were dancing under the Southern Cross constellation in the nighttime sky. A very attractive blonde in a leather miniskirt, and a vest with a plunging neckline, approached me and asked me to dance. Maybe she had seen my outstanding race exploits that day and was attracted to me for that reason. It is amazing the amount of delusional thoughts about women that race through your mind when you are drinking. She told me that she liked Yanks as we got down to some bumping and grinding for a long time. It was a hot summer (US winter) evening, and with all that dancing I took my shirt off and was left with only a pair of sweat pants on. The blonde dancer started to get friendlier and friendlier, and I wasn’t one to complain, being a guest in a foreign country. I wanted to be the good American, after all. She bit down on the top of my sweat pants with her teeth, and started to pull them down. I thought she would pull them down an inch to two at the most – I was wrong, as I quickly realized that the wind was whistling around my jewels and the rest of my worldly possessions were lying around my ankles. The five couples dancing stopped and looked at my red face and me. I snapped up the sweats and had a quick chat with the blonde. She told me many secrets, the most important being that her husband was the leader of the drunken louts in the kitchen, who were now staring at me with blurred vision and intent on harm. Within nano-seconds I decided to become a shadow, and disappear into the high grass field behind the house. There I squatted for an hour, watching the house for marauding groups of men with flashlights and clubs. The danger finally passed, and I was able to return to the bus and the comforting sounds of Steve snoring into the night. All was at peace again, and life was indeed great.
I cannot honestly say that racing at Wanganui was a fun experience. It was an experience you could tell fellow racers over the years, “I raced at Wanganui and survived!”
By Shawn McDonald
This is the story of just one of five racers and six support people who traveled to the southern hemisphere to compete in five races of the New Zealand National Road Racing Championships in December 1990 and January 1991.
Team America, consisting of the juvenile and not so juvenile derelict racers Bruce Lind (Captain America), Steve Dahlstrom, Mike Sullivan, Troy Burstyk and myself, arrived in the quaint New Zealand town of Wanganui (Waaangnoohhii) two days before Christmas. The Santa Claus and his Reindeer arrival temperature was in the 80s (about 30 Centigrade), and it was sunny. You may remember the northwest was suffering the monster 1989 snowstorm that made International news and left most of you stranded. We, of course, all missed America and the snowstorms as we drove through the green pastoral lands of New Zealand, while passing Kiwi Lagers and getting totally pissed, mate.
Bruce, Steve, Troy and I settled down just outside of town at the promoter, Don Cosford’s house, while Mike stayed with the village constable Tony, and his family. The three bachelors were cordoned off in a 1960 converted bus just outside the house. Troy and I slept on the couches, if that’s what you could call them, while Dahlstrom stayed in the back of the bus in a private room with a door. It wasn’t that Troy and I were that friendly, it was that the bedroom and closed door slightly muted the sound of the most horrific snorer this side of the Pecos. When Troy’s girlfriend joined us later on in the trip they took over the bedroom, and left me defenseless to the rumblings of death, except for a couple of pillows to stuff my ears with or to throw at Steve when my ears started to bleed. I found a new use for racing earplugs, and that was to shove them up Steve’s nose.
They raise close to 60 million sheep in New Zealand, or 20 sheep per person (sheep jokes are mandatory way of life while driving in a van full of racers), but Don Cosford was closer to being a swine in sheep’s clothing. Think of the Blues Brothers movie where ‘Joliet’ Jake Blues turns to a family sitting down at a table in a restaurant and, in a foreign accent, asks the father, “How much for the little girl?” – you are just scratching the surface of the true Cosford. To give the swine credit, he did work with Bruce on setting up our five-week road trip down under to race five out of the six National Championship rounds.
One of the prerequisites for competing in the New Zealand championships was for each rider on our stopover in Hawaii to buy a fifth of Jack Daniels at the duty free shop for Cosford. If there was no JD in our hands there would be no racing, or so we were threatened. He would mix it half and half with Coke and start sipping it at 5am, and would finally stop when he fell asleep in his chair at midnight. All those Jack Daniels disappeared within the first week. Cosford was generous enough that he offered to set us up in the best brothels in Wanganui with the finest girls, if we wanted. We didn’t want to. Cosford was a multi-time National Sidecar Speedway Champion, the promoter of the Wanganui Cemetery Street Circuit National road race and not a bad bloke after all was said, and one with a great family. He was certainly a character no one who has crossed his path will ever forget.
The Cemetery Street Circuit is well named, as it runs through the heart of town and into a cemetery that stopped accepting candidates in the 1920s. Remember that a cemetery is unlike a prison in that people are dying to get in. The circuit starts on the main street, with a small straight that leads to the first cross street where you turn right at 90 degrees. Gas it, shift up twice, brake and take another 90-degree right corner and head down the main straightaway. You get used to the 90-degree turns, because that’s the way the streets are laid out. When it rains in New Zealand it rains really hard. To get all that water off the road and down the drainage real fast the streets have a very steep down slope (or camber) on both sides of the center stripe. For the racer that meant you entered a corner in a steep on-camber position, and exited in a steep off-camber position. When you crested the top of the street you could pull a wheelie with a little cross-up thrown in to thrill yourself and the crowds. I only did mine by accident. “Whoaaa, get down boy. No more of that, do you hear!” The main straight was long as it ran next to a river, and you could click it up to sixth gear and look over at the K-Mart shoppers as you passed by.
Just before entering into the holy sanctuary of the cemetery at the end of the straight you had to cross the famous railroad tracks. Your hand was bending the brake lever, as you were hard on the brakes when your tires crossed these shiny bands of bumpy steel.
Every year since 1952, an estimated 10 to 15 thousand people have attended this Boxing Day event (English holiday, the day after Christmas). Many of these spectators watched by hanging off, or sitting on, the gargantuan tombstones that stood up to ten feet high, bestowing an owner’s box view as the riders entered the uphill right, left, right esses through the valley of death. After you had feared no evil, you pointed straight towards the flower garden, then braked and yanked it hard to the right for a 120-degree turn. If you missed the braking markers you were most likely pushing up daises – daises and roses were planted in the garden. Oh, you thought I meant something else. Silly bugger! Accelerating hard with a blip of the throttle, you leaned it left to cross the Bridge of Sighs and then the finish line.
Now do that 20 times alongside 60 bikes with curbs, light poles, hay bales, street signs and brick buildings to hit at the edge of the track, and no run-off room at all. Now do it again, and again. The bridge was scary, because trains ran under it and there was a fair amount of uncontrolled drop if you made a mistake. Many a rear tire slid to the curb of the bridge and crashed the bike.
You knew all these immoveable objects were well padded with hay bales, but they were just hay bales after all, and weren’t supposed to save your life. The consequences of making a mistake on this street race were much greater than on a specially built racetrack. There was always that thought that you could die on this track, people had before and would again. The question was would it be you?
The crowds sitting at the corners to watch the races, with their caskets of ice and beer, delighted in their morbidity. They wandered through our Team America pits and watched as Sullivan applied ice to his swollen ankle after a practice crash on the bridge. If you caught the first issue of Bench Racer you saw a picture of one of our Wanganui hosts, Owen Sutter, flipping his sidecar off the bridge in the 1960s. If that wasn’t enough damage to Sutter’s pride, Dahlstrom successfully chased down his daughter Leann.
All of Team America raced in the Formula II class after we had been incorrectly advised our Yamaha FZR 600s would be legal in the New Zealand production class by that swine Cosford. Wrong! Sullivan was fine, since he had actually brought a Yamaha TZ250 with him. Troy was the only one to scrounge up a stock shock, fork springs, brake lines and oil cooler to muster tech inspection, even with a few Kiwis grumbling loudly in the background. Something about kill the Yanks and burn the Yanks was heard, but not confirmed and verified.
That gave the young and brave Troy twice the amount of track time as anybody else on Team America, since he could race in the production and F-II classes. Track time was essential on this course as the only practice was the morning of race day. Learn real fast, or go real slow. Dahlstrom and I started near the back, because of the first race results in Auckland where I didn’t even finish. Sullivan took off on his injured ankle and battled with international racing star Robert Holden (killed at the ultimate street race, the Isle of Man, a few years later), on his V-Twin 600 Ducati Pantah with its aluminum perimeter frame, a nitro methane-fueled superbike, and F-II champion Mike Webb (current factory Yamaha GP mechanic to the GP Moto series) on another TZ. When the Ducati passed by your eyes would start to water as the toxic fumes burned into your pupils.
Bruce, with his track knowledge – he’d raced the track three previous times – was going for top production-based four stroke in eighth place, while Troy stayed steady in tenth spot, putting his extra track time to his advantage. Where were Dahlstrom and myself? We were in mid-pack, about 14th and 15th place, battling the motocross bikes with big disc brakes. I was leading going into the flower garden when the rider directly ahead of me crashed under braking. There was nowhere to go except over his rear wheel. As I styled in a slight cross-up while flying through the air, Dahlstrom took the opportunity to pass me, as I had to turn around and find the course again. No I didn’t crash; after all I was a past Bozocrosser. Seeing Steve in front of me got my juices flowing again, as I tracked him down and repassed him.
The thing about racing a street circuit is that if you try to hang it all out you will go slower and probably crash. The secret is to ride under extreme control and at 90 per cent throttle, like an endurance race. Sullivan finished in third place, while Bruce and Troy placed eighth and tenth. Steve and I were fairly depressed at showing this huge Kiwi crowd just how bad some of Team America really was. Then quite a few riders and spectators came up to us and congratulated us on our excellent finishes. Steve and I looked at each other in total amazement, with our mouths hitting our chests. According to Kiwi standards we did pretty good for some blokes who had never seen the track or had raced on the street before. After we signed some autographs we did what we always did after the race, packed five race bikes and every bolt and nut we could find onto the trailer. Then we drove a whopping mile and a half to Cosford’s house.
That night there was a huge piss-up at Cosford’s house as about 70 to 80 racers, support people and track workers showed up to consume gargantuan amounts of beer. Fact #1, New Zealand has the highest per capita amount of beer thrown down the throat than anyplace in the world. Fact #2, the beer in NZ is about five percent alcohol. Fact #3, there are tons of microbreweries there. Fact #4, they have Super Liquor Man stores where you can drive through to pick up your tinnies. I am talking PARTY! The night quickly fades from my memory. I remember a group of NZ racers and their friends hanging out in the kitchen, completely smashed. Strangely enough, with their NZ accents combined with the slurred speech of too much drink, they started to sound like Yanks and I could understand them.
Out on the back patio music was playing, and people were dancing under the Southern Cross constellation in the nighttime sky. A very attractive blonde in a leather miniskirt, and a vest with a plunging neckline, approached me and asked me to dance. Maybe she had seen my outstanding race exploits that day and was attracted to me for that reason. It is amazing the amount of delusional thoughts about women that race through your mind when you are drinking. She told me that she liked Yanks as we got down to some bumping and grinding for a long time. It was a hot summer (US winter) evening, and with all that dancing I took my shirt off and was left with only a pair of sweat pants on. The blonde dancer started to get friendlier and friendlier, and I wasn’t one to complain, being a guest in a foreign country. I wanted to be the good American, after all. She bit down on the top of my sweat pants with her teeth, and started to pull them down. I thought she would pull them down an inch to two at the most – I was wrong, as I quickly realized that the wind was whistling around my jewels and the rest of my worldly possessions were lying around my ankles. The five couples dancing stopped and looked at my red face and me. I snapped up the sweats and had a quick chat with the blonde. She told me many secrets, the most important being that her husband was the leader of the drunken louts in the kitchen, who were now staring at me with blurred vision and intent on harm. Within nano-seconds I decided to become a shadow, and disappear into the high grass field behind the house. There I squatted for an hour, watching the house for marauding groups of men with flashlights and clubs. The danger finally passed, and I was able to return to the bus and the comforting sounds of Steve snoring into the night. All was at peace again, and life was indeed great.
I cannot honestly say that racing at Wanganui was a fun experience. It was an experience you could tell fellow racers over the years, “I raced at Wanganui and survived!”
