Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Garry McCoV c..OME.TH on a full-bore V-four) having yet to complete a full season, his victory in the South African GP was achieved with such assurance and style that nobody could write it off as a fluke, or a flash in the pan. "When I came in last year, a lot of people were saying to me that my riding style wasn't right for a V-four. Racing insiders - even some people in my own team - told me that if I wanted to improve, I must ride like the other guys. I tried to do that, but it just didn't work for me, so I went back to my own way," McCoy explained, over a beer (for me) and a mineral water (for him) at our Malaysian hotel. "I started racing speedway in Australia at the age of 16 - though I'd been riding bikes since I was six years old," he said. "On a speedway bike, you put the bike sideways to slow it down, and keep it sideways on throttle control to get it out of the corner. It's hard to change what you're used to doing." Speedway, Australian style, is the same as in Britain - simple, lightweight 500cc single-cylinder four-strokes in flimsy frames, with no brakes and just one gear. They only go right when they're spinning and sliding. McCoy followed his father into the sport, and found he had a certain aptitude. Growing up in Camden, New South Wales - an hour or two out of Sydney - he was steeped in motorcycling culture, and was set to go further in his chosen sport when road racing, rather unexpectedly, intervened. "The first road race I ever even watched was the GP at Eastern Creek in 1991," McCoy said. "Actually, I didn't watch it - I thought it was so boring. I'd gone round to visit Mat Mladin, who was a good friend, to see if he wanted to go out and do something, but he said, "No, I'm watching this race on TV.' I stayed for a bit, but then I'd had enough, and I left him to it." It was Mladin (now the defending AMA Superbike Champion) who influenced McCoy's move, however. "I'd been saving a bit of money, for a ticket to England and a couple of speedway bikes, and I was planning to go over and race speedway there. Craig Boyce (a noted speedway exponent) was a neighbor By MICHAEL SCOTT PHOTOS BY GOLD & GOOSE F ashions change, and not only in racing. Once upon a time, a decade or so back, there was only one way to race a 500 - using the techniques of the U.S. oval dirt tracks, introduced in the late '70s by Kenny Roberts. Vaulting power of four-cylinder 500s had so oveKcome the ability of the t.ires and chassis to contain it that, instead of relying on mechanical fidelity, riaers had to treat the bike like a wild mustang instead. Throttles open wide, rear tires spinning wildly; they'd steer by sliding the tail out like a dirt tracker, throwing up a rooster tail of stones and dust as they use the slide not only to slow the bike down and to get it turned, but also as the only way to cope with an excess of power over traction. On tarmac, the rooster tail was an abstract, but the principle is the same. The results were spectacular. And for a generation of 500cc racers - from Roberts to Wayne Gardner, Eddie Lawson, Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey - it was the only way to ride. Mick Doohan could do it too, when he needed to, but that wasn't very often, as a new generation of ex-250cc riders moved up to the 500cc class, bringing with them a different technique of high corner speed and smooth lines. And though lap times didn't improve, there seemed to be different explanations for that - higher weight limits, unleaded fuel and so on. Conventional wisdom insisted that tires and chassis design had improved so much that the old dirt-track techniques were a thing of the past. The rooster-tail days were gone. It took just one rider in one race to blow all that away. Suddenly, with the 2000 season barely beginning, the old-time religion was bidding for a comeback, and all those certainties were not so certain after all. That rider is the little Australian Garry McCoy, and although McCoy - who turns 28 shortly after the Japanese GP - is a relative class newcomer (at least 20 APRIL 19, 2000' cue I e n .. vv s of mine, and we were best friends, and he was over in England. At that time, Mat had just got his Team· Kawasaki Australia ride (M1adin went on to win the Australian National Superbike title). I could see that there was more money in it than speedway, and it seemed pretty easy by comparison. I thought maybe that would be the way to go." So he bought himself a Suzuki RGV250 toward the end of '91, and had. won his first race within a couple of months. Clearly, he had a certain aptitude for this as well - spotted by then Australian resident Barry Sheene, who was able to recommend him as a replacement rider for injured Peter Oettl at the Australian GP in 1992. McCoy took the AGV Rotax up to eighth place before retiring with exhaust problems. He had a couple more guest rides that year, and in 1993 he got a full-time ride with the AGV Germany Aprilia team, finishing 10th at home in Australia, and a best of seventh at Laguna Seca. With his size (a 121 pounder) the 125cc class seemed the natural place, but he insists today that the 500cc class was always his goal. "It wasn't really the way I wanted to start - but it was a quick way into GP racing," McCoy said. "And once I was there, I thought that if I could find a decent team I'd have a chance of winning the World Championship. Instead, I seemed to just get stuffed around by different teams." Something of an understatement, as he found himself let down financially and in all sorts of ways, with a particular low point in 1995 when he split with his German Honda team after only four races to go back to Australia. "I don't like to be treated like a dog," he said then; and now adds: "Every team I picked seemed to end up with a struggle." Anyway, he won two races, and things picked up toward the end of his five years in the class, with a best overall position in 1997 of seventh overall. "I believed from the start I could have ridden a 500," he says, explaining that even on a 125 he was using the techniques he'd learned on the shale of the speedway tracks. "On a 125 you try not to slide because it slows you down - but a lot of times I'd be

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