P96
CN
III BOOK REVIEW
BY ALAN CATHCART
many of which speak a thousand words. Check
out Mick Doohan powersliding his Suzuki RM80
in 1976 at age 11, or Mick Cole on the mile-wide
Honda CBX six-cylinder leading the vast pack
into Turn 1 of the 1978 Castrol Six Hours, already
by then the most important production-bike race
on the planet, or, well, we're limited for space, so
suffice to say that this book is almost worth buying
just for the superlative photos, all 335 of them.
A country whose Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser
got noticed when he swapped the succession of
Bultaco off-roaders he'd been riding for a KTM in
1977, Australia witnessed an explosion of inter-
est in motorcycling in the early 1970s, fueled by
the massive mining boom which put money in the
pockets of young blokes in pursuit of speed and
thrills on two wheels. Over 160,000 motorcycles—
minibikes, off-roaders and high-performance road
bikes, 90% of them Japanese—were sold in 1972
to a population of just 12.5 million, and in June
RACE
ACROSS
THE GREAT
DIVIDE
T
he much spoken-of but still undiscovered
Australian Rider Factory must surely exist
somewhere in the vast island continent, to
allow a country with a population of fewer than 25
million to produce such a consistent array of world
title-winning riders over the past half-century. We
in Britain are now accustomed to seeing more
than one-third of BSB grids occupied by Austral-
asians—so yes, Kiwis too—who have traveled to
the other side of the world to pursue their goals
of winning races and championships, and all too
often, they do just that. This book tells the story of
how that came about.
Though a healthy contingent of riders from
Down Under had already become part of the Con-
tinental Circus privateer community in 1950s-'60s
Grand Prix road racing, it wasn't until the 1970s
and the advent of the Superbike era—a class of
racing founded in Australia in 1972, as its inventor
Vincent Tesoriero explains in this book—that Aus-
tralasians began to really make their mark on the
global stage. This magnificent coffee-table sized
volume recounts the often-amazing story of how
that occurred, told by two of Australia's finest mo-
torcycle journalists who were there when it hap-
pened, and illustrated by a vast number of photos,
