Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Troy Bayliss By Everything about him is positive. I'm really impressed with how fast he learned Daytona, first time there, first time on our superbike. I'm hopeful of good things." Bayliss, himself, was typically nonchalant. "It was a combination of feeling good and every day you should go faster," Bayliss said at the time. "The guys are always mucking around with the bike to change something here and there, just little things. Obviously, I know the bike's pretty good. Just little things to make me more comfortable and a bit more track knowledge and conditions weren't so bad. Conditions weren't so bad, conditions weren't good, but they were consistent for a long time, so to do a few fast laps wasn't a problem." Bayliss spent the past two years in the British Midlands racing for the GSE Racing INS Ducati HENNY RAY ABRAMS .im Leonard liked what he saw. "'The veteran Vance & Hines Ducati crew chief was watching a videotape of a rider who wanted a job. The rider was an Australian and the audition tape was a highlight reel of the Australian Superbike Championship. The rider had won the championship and now he felt the same draw to America which so many of his countrymen had felt, starting with Kevin Magee and on to Troy Corser, Mat Mladin, Anthony Gobert and Damon Buckmaster. The rider who won the championship was good, the rider Leonard saw was better. "I got a promotional tape from Marty Craggill at the end of '97 and Troy was on a couple of the clips from race footage," Leonard said of his introduction to Troy Bayliss. "And I • came away thinking, 'That's the guy we need to get.' I actually pushed him pretty hard last year, but it didn't happen. When they [Ducati] took Ben [Bostrom] away, he [Bayliss] was our best choice." America, specifically Daytona International Speedway, welcomed Troy Bayliss with open arms and Bayliss returned the favor in kind - blistering the superspeedway to take the fastest time in his first trip to the track, his first time in America, his first experience with Daytona dual-compound tires, and his first ride aboard the Vance & Hines Ducati. Even though he'd won the ultra-competitive British Superbike Championship in 1999, no one was quite sure what to make of the 30-year-old father of two. By the end of the second day of the three-day test, it was clear he'd made his' mark. "I'm really impressed by the guy," said Leonard, who's worked with a number of AMA Superbike Champions and who just survived his second season with another fast Aussie, the unpredictable and unprofessional Anthony Gobert. "He's prepared, works hard, pays attention - obviously, he's got talent. 22 JANUARV 26. 2000' II: U II: I e n e team, but he grew up in Taree, a small town along the Pacific Highway on the North Coast about 210 miles north of Sydney in the state of New South Wales. Like a lot of Australian riders who find their way into road racing, he began in motocross, moving to pavement in the early 1990s. If he has a kindred spirit among the current lot of Aussie invaders, it would be Chaparral Suzuki's Damon Buckmaster. Both are somewhat reserved in nature. Low-key and hard-working, they let their riding do the talking. Neither has the bombast and _ s outspokenness of Gobert or Mat Mladin. Both are eminently approachable. It's no surprise that the two have been friends and rivals for some time, racing against each other in the Australian 600cc Supersport Series. In 1993, Bayliss, whose physical bearing brings to mind Chuck Graves, finished sixth in the 600cc championship, a position he duplicated the following year before jumping to second in 1995. That got him noticed by the Superbike teams and he moved up to the big class in 1996, taking second in the Australian Shell Superbike Championship his first year out on a Suzuki GSX-R750. The next year he switched to Kawasaki and finished second to Marty Craggill in the Shell Superbike Championship. Of more consequence was a one-off ride at the Australian Grand Prix at Phillip Island. • He was asked by Suzuki to ride an RGV250, a bike he'd never ridden before, in a Grand Prix field loaded with talent. Bayliss qualified sixth and finished sixth amid a pack of five riders all contesting third. He was less than a second off the podium. That single ride was the catalyst for his next move, to Europe for the first time to ride for the GSE Racing INS Ducati team. "I got a couple of calls from the boss from England and off I went, two weeks later," Bayliss remembered during a conversation in the Vance & Hines transporter during the December Dunlop Daytona tire tests. "Took the family, off I went. "First year, it was a good year, a lot of learning, new people, new bike, never been on a Ducati and the team had just switched to Dunlops, and they'd never run Dunlops. I had a real lot of things to learn. I got on good with everyone. The bike, we had a few little problems and I had a few crashes. To cut a long story short, the second year we made all the changes that we needed to do and we won more races than anyone and ended up winning the championship, which is what we wanted to do. It just took a year longer than what we wanted." The British Championship consists of 12 races, two races each at well-known championship tracks like Donington Park and Brands Hatch and Silverstone, but

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