Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

·. .. " TE V W Anthony Gobert IN R IE nthony Gobert is standing in the pits at Phillip Island Raceway, his helmet and gear bag at his feet, a partially disassembled Honda RC45 resting nearby, no longer at his disposal."The works Honda had been brought to Australia for Gobert to race in his homeland in the fin al World Superbike Championship round, and on this day, a test session a week or so prior to the race, Honda has changed its mind, leaving Gobert stranded - no bike, no entry, no luck. He hangs around, chatting with hi s former Winfield Honda teammate Kirk McCarthy, then decides, "If that's the way the y want to be, I'll go talk to • Kawa sak i." So , h e s a y s, he walked down th e pits and "s p oke with Steve Johnson and ask ed if they had a spare bike." Johnson p icks up the story. "I said, 'Sure, sure we have a spare bike: A few minutes afte r that he thr ew a leg over it and did 20 lap s on it. I think he went as quick as he'd gon e the week before on his Honda," Johnson remembers" And the follow ing wee k he went-even faster. "He wen t two seconds faste r on our bik e th an h e did on "the H on d a," Rob Muzzy says. "I expec ted a second and a "half." And it was a spectacu lar two seconds a lap, accord ing to Mu zzy. "One of the things he was saying he really liked abou t our bike is that it had a lot mor e lo ck on it . In othe r word s, you canget the thing hung out farther before you got on the s tee rin g lock. And, the fact is, he'd have the thing over on the lock, back wheel smoking . When it's time to s tra ig h ten it out, he'd sit ba ck, lift the front end, and drive off, very remin iscent of Scott Ru ssell," Muzzy says . When the race ' w e ek e n d arriv ed , Gobert qualified on the pole in his first race aboard the Mu zzy Kawasaki. Not a bad start and an omen of better things to come. He would have finished second in the first leg. but slowed late in the race to grant teammate Scott Russell safe passage into second place, and the invaluable World Championship points that went with it. He won the second race. "I thought, maybe it might have been a little closer, but I felt like I was riding pretty good," Gobert, who turns 20 the Sunday prior to the Daytona 200, says matter-of-factl y about his s tu n n in g Kawasaki debut. Where once America was the breeding ground of champions, now it seems Australia exports the most talent. The tide began to swing in earnest when Aussie Wayne Gardner wori the 500cc World Championship for Honda in 1987. His was a style of brute force and " uncompromising will, a technique forged from racing Superbikes in Great Britain. Unfortunately, it landed the Wollongong native in hospitals all over the world and he wa s never an effective force at Honda after his title season. But Honda had already begun grooming his successor, the reticent, but extremely talented Michael Doohan. Like Gardner, he'd come to the SODs from the Superbike class, but in Au stralia where he'd raced for the Marlboro Yamaha team. The two couldn't be more different; Gardner all bravado and bombast, Doohan almost reclusive and distrustful. It wasn't until 1992 that Doohan emerged as a World Championship threat and that was the year he threw the title away in As s en . In 1994 h e would "finally get his just . rewards. And he would not be the year's only Au stralian emigrant champion. Troy Corser, after win ning the Shell Oils Au stralian Superbike title for the Winfield Honda team , with Gobert as his teammate, conque red America and has since moved on to the World Superbike wars. Next in the line of suc cession is Gobert. Like Gardner, Doohan, and Corser, he, too, has won a title for H ond a , in hi s case the 1994 Au s si e Superb ike crown in his se con d fu ll season of road racin g. and th ird seaso n overall. Such precoci ou snes s d idn't go unnoticed by Honda, and he was to be the rid er of the future . But his vi e w and their vi ew of th e future were markedly d ifferent , so he h as taken his talent and his future to the Rob Muzzy Kawa s aki team, where he'll make his American debut at Da ytona and then team with Scott Russell on the World Superbike team . That h e has come so far, so fast, is extraordinary, though he doesn't see it that way. 'Tm fully dedicated to the sport, to racing." Gobert said. "I don't have any other job. I turned professional at age 15 when I left school. It was a big risk for me to leave school and go straight to racing. I had to have a lot of confidence in my ability. I did have it. I just kept my head down, kept training, kept learning. kept working really hard, kept doing what I need to do to make it the big package that you need to make motorcycle racin g work. Apart from that, I th ink that sort of h ard work has gotten me where I am in such a sho rt time ." The work began when he got on his first motorcycle - actuall y a three-wheeled Honda ATV - as a four-year-old . He would soon progress to 50s and 80s and began racing when he was 10 aboard a Yamaha YZ60. "I raced every weekend, motocross or dirt track, seven or eight classes a day from when I was 12 to when I was 15," Gobert recalls, and he was successful very early on, winning 17 Junior National titles and the same amount of titles from his state of New South Wales. From there he merely had to wait until he w as 16 so he could contest the senior class, and it would be another year before he could road race. He spent 1992, his first year as a senior, winning all of the major championships and decided " halfway into that year his future was on the pavement. Knowing how expensive it would be, he planned to fund his road racing career by competing in the 15 highest-paying Supercross races. The final scorecard would be 13 wins, two DNFs and hours of learning. His road racing style is heavily influenced by his motocross experience. At the same time he was winning Supercrosses he was beginning his road racing career aboard a Honda 250 street-

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