Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

FIM World Championship Speedway Grand Prix Series Round 10: Telstra Stadium Giving the competition something to think about reg Hancock finished the World Championship season on a personal high by winning the inaugural Australian Grand Prix in Sydney. The Californian, without a British club this year and now based in Sweden during the European racing season, beat Scott Nicholls, Jason Crump and Rune Holta in the final in front of a crowd of 31,000 inside Stadium Australia to claim his first Grand Prix victory for over two years. The success made for a perfect end to a campaign that has steadily gathered pace for the 1997 World Champion, and it gave Hancock the distinction of being the first-ever winner of a Grand Prix round staged in the Southern Hemisphere. It was also the fifth Grand Prix victory of the American's career, making him the sixth most successful GP rider of all time. Afterwards he paid homage to his new Swedish roots, a move forced upon him this season after he was frozen out of British speedway by a controversia I ruling restricting the number of GP riders in each team. "I have a completely new Swedish pit team with me this year," Hancock said, "and they have done a great job. I have to say lowe a lot of the success to my mechanics and the guys I work with, particularly Bill Nilsson, the father of my head mechanic Jeff Nilsson. He's been playing with my engines all year long, and has certainly added another twist. "They don't come from a speedway background - they're motocross people, and enduro and stuff like that - but they put an interesting twist in to my whole year, and between them and Lars, who is working in the pits for me too, those guys have turned my year around completely. "Perhaps there is also something in the clean Swedish air as well - living in Stockholm 'seems to have paid off for me." Hancock's last Grand Prix victory was at Vojens in Denmark in 2000, and Saturday's success meant he finishes this year's series in sixth place, his highest position of the season. Though he was last in his opening race in heat 10 (which was nothing more than a race for gate positions in the Main Event) Hancock then outgated World Champion Tony Rickardsson to win heat 13, finished second in 19 after pluckily regaining 66 • STORY AND PHOTOS BY JOHN HIPKISS SYDNEY, AOsTRAllA, OCT. 26 G NOVEMBER 13, 2002' cue • n e ... -- second place off Tomasz Gollob and then won his semi-final when it was reduced to a two-man rerun. The meeting's only serious crash saw Czech prospect Lukas Dryml spin and lift as he shut off gas to avoid hitting Hancock on the first turn, and his out-of-control machine collected Mikael Karlsson in a nastylooking crash. Karlsson then took a heavy, head-first fall and was stretchered off the track, unable to take his place in the rerun. Though Karlsson's blood pressure dropped to cause some alarm amongst the medical staff, he soon recovered in the pits and left the stadium under his own steam. Dryml was excluded. Hancock beat Nicholls in the rerun and in the final, he then went off gate two, shooting away to keep first Crump, and then his Team GSR stablemate Nicholls at bay to bank the full 25 points. Holta failed to make full use of the inside, which had produced the previous five winners and 16 out of the first 24, trailing in last as Crump tried to put pressure on Nicholls, who, like Holta, was competing in his first GP final. "What a night, to say the leastl" Hancock said. "We had every ambition to come here and try and win this thing and to work our way up the lad- der a bit further - and we did win, so it's a fantastic feeling. "We really thought we had the right set-up in the first race and when we came back in, it was straight back to the drawing board. But we fixed it and got it right back. "We tried something totally crazy for the first race just to see how it would work - and it didn't! We just went back to what we had. "We knew what was going good but that race (heat 10) is also good for a little bit of a test to see if you can make something just that little bit better in racing circumstances. "Gate one was quite deep at the end of the meeting so it wasn't the best gate to have all night. It was a one-line track most of the night; going out wide didn't work, although towards the end there was a little bit there. But when you had a fast guy on the inside line, it was almost impossible to do anything. "The best chance was to try and pressure somebody into a mistake, which I think Scotty Nicholls and Andreas Jonsson and a few of them did. But when J got into a position, I kind of just worked hard to fight for what I had. The final was the most important race and I pulled it off when it mattered." Rickardsson, already crowned World Champion for the fifth time in nine years after winning the penultimate round in Denmark, missed out on the semi-finals for the first time this season when he finished third in heat 21 when Nicholls drove under him and then rode the perfect line to keep the master Swede behind him. Holta caught Gollob by a whisker in heat 22 to force his way into the last eight on the way to his first final, and there had been an even closer finish in heat 12, with Sebastian Ulamek just getting the nod ahead of Polish colleague Krzysztof Cegielski for second place in what was close to being deemed a dead-heat by British referee Tony Steele. With one-time series leader Ryan Sullivan excluded for touching the tapes in the first semi-final, Crump stole ahead of his fellow countryman to repeat last year's feat of finishing runner-up to Rickardsson in the overall standings, though 19 points behind. Crump, one of seven Australian riders taking part in the event, was hoping to finish better than third in front of some partisan home support, but he was again the victim of drawing unfavorable gate positions in both the semi-final and final. All the same he recognized what a boost a Grand Prix in his home country had been. "It was a fantastic night for Australian speedway," he said, "and all the Aussie boys were so pleased to have been able to race in

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