Read an extract from Phillip Island by John Smailes.
Read a section of Phillip Island by John Smailes, the inside story of Australia's fastest racetrack.
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Wayne gardner—genesis and genius
We’re sitting in Wayne Gardner’s time capsule, an industrial warehouse he built with some of his winnings from ten years of grand prix motorcycle racing. It’s in a suburb of Wollongong, Australia’s sole surviving steel city, 100 kilometres south of Sydney. He built this small enclave 34 years ago while he was still racing. Now, long retired, he’s just finished another, much grander one further up the coast. He’s a proud builder, managing his investments from afar. He lives in Monaco; when in Australia he stays with his dad Norm, sleeping in the second bedroom of the home unit he bought his folks overlooking Wollongong’s North Beach.
The time capsule, in the industrial complex, holds the detritus of his incredibly successful vocation. It’s dusty, decaying. So many trophies, their metal surfaces pitted with rust, wobbly on their bases. So many cardboard boxes, so limp at the edges they’ll fall apart if you try to lift them. A crumpled tarp pulled back reveals upwards of 50 race suits, chronicles of his career. His mum, Shirley, used to care for them all. She died in 2016, aged 81. ‘I know I should do something with it, maybe a museum,’ he smiles, a bit apologetically. You bet he should.
Wayne Gardner, the Wollongong Whiz, invented motorcycle racing as a popularised sport in Australia.
There’d been world champions before, three of them, but none in the Senior class. And none who could put motorcycle racing on the front page of the national newspapers. Gardner was the man for his time.
Australia, caught up in the fervour of its bicentenary, was not short of heroes. In the year Gardner won his world title, Pat Cash won Wimbledon; Jeff Fenech was world super bantamweight champion, our first multi-weight title holder; and Greg Norman broke the nation’s heart by choking at the US Augusta Masters. But when Australia’s Sportsman of the Year was announced, Gardner was called forward, the first time for a motorcycle rider. The grand prix champions who came later—Mick Doohan and Casey Stoner—would be beneficiaries.
The Whiz has been well documented. In 2018 he even pioneered the art of the biopic—a 90-minute movie on his life (these days, it seems, every sportsperson has one). What was left to say?
‘I’ve got an idea,’ he says. Reaching forward to his phone on the desk, he punches in a speed-dial number and puts the call on speakerphone.
‘It’s your ex-husband,’ Gardner announces, a huge grin on his face.
Donna is happy to talk.
*
They met on a blind date when Donna was not quite sixteen. ‘We went to the Oxford Tavern, corner of Corrimal and Crown streets in Wollongong, a music venue. No need for fake ID. That wasn’t an issue,’ Donna smiled down the phone. She knew Wayne as an apprentice steelworker with an uncanny resemblance to pop star John Paul Young. Less than three years later they were in the UK. ‘My dad was horrified, but my mum said, “Let her go.” I would have gone anyway.’
The rough diamond had been partially polished. He’d turned up at Sydney’s Oran Park with talent and attitude. Arthur and Jan Blizzard, who ran motorcycling in New South Wales, held him back in the junior grades. ‘Otherwise he would have killed himself,’ Arthur contended.
‘Cracking the Sydney crowd was tough,’ Donna said. ‘We were from the ’Gong and the established riders didn’t want us there.’
‘Dickheads,’ Gardner concurred.
Team Gardner was a bit fragile, a bit defensive. As a TV commentator at the time, I recall a blast from Donna over a perceived slight.
Tuner Peter Molloy got him next. Molloy was a driver whisperer. He was mainly an engine builder but practised sports psychology long before it became a science. Gardner was Molloy’s first bike rider.
‘Wayne was a scruffy little mutt, like a Jack Russell. Molloy cleaned him up,’ Donna said.
Billy Hill, owner of Mentor Motorcycles, put him on a series of Molloy-prepared bikes. He won the Castrol Six Hour, then the Australian Superbike Championship.
Japanese tuner Mamoru Moriwaki took him global, to Japan for the Suzuka 8 Hours (pole), America for the Daytona 200 (fourth) and the UK for the British superbike championship (third—could have won but for a last-lap bike failure). Moriwaki rightly saw Australia as a pool full of rider talent.
In 1981 Wayne was in the UK, lonely in the spare room of teammate Roger Marshall’s house in rural Lincolnshire, when he phoned home. ‘If I had a seventeen-year-old daughter now, absolutely no way I’d let her go. But Mum and Dad paid my fare,’ Donna said. She was on a mission. ‘I had to protect him: from other girls, from the wheeler-dealers and sharks.’ From other girls? ‘He was a shocker, but we never discussed it. I’d never tarnish his reputation. I loved him, heart and soul.’
Gardner’s first world championship race was almost his last. In the 1983 Dutch Grand Prix at Assen, he was an inadvertent participant in a race crash that almost killed world champion Franco Uncini.
‘He went down,’ Gardner remembered. ‘Most others went right to miss him; I went left and hit him hard.’ Uncini’s helmet came off and he lay still.
‘People attacked Wayne, told him he shouldn’t have been racing [at that level],’ Donna recalled.
‘If Uncini had died I would have stopped,’ Wayne agreed.
It would be 52 grands prix and almost five years before he’d crash in another world championship race. (A qualification: there were falls in non-title events, in testing and in practice.) By then he was world champion and he crashed trying to tame his evil-handling 1988 Honda NSR500 in a desperate and futile defence of his title.
‘They’d sent me home because they thought I was a distraction,’ Donna said of Wayne’s opening season with Honda. Half a season later she was back, and Wayne’s results improved.
In 1985, Rothmans had entered motorcycle racing to complement its successful sports car and rally program. Wayne was fourth for Rothmans Team Honda in 1985 and second to rival Eddie Lawson in 1986. In 1987 he was world champion. Donna was with him on the podium when he won it.
‘The promoter pushed me up there,’ she said. Wayne was alone on the winner’s podium of the 1987 Brazilian Grand Prix, a white world-champion T-shirt pulled on hastily over his leathers, unsuccessfully fighting back tears, his Michelin cap clumsily on his head. ‘He’d beaten Eddie, who refused to go up on the dais, so they sent me instead.’ Donna clutched—hugged, actually—the trophy while Wayne sprayed the champagne. Donna’s flared miniskirt did no harm to their image.
Gardner’s world championship, and the notion of a boy from the ’Gong made good, set two-wheel sport alight.
On Saturday, 17 October 1987, it seemed all of Wollongong turned out to fete Gardner, and Donna, in the amphitheatre in Crown Street Mall. Wayne was presented with the key to the city. The ‘key’ was a new idea for Wollongong, so Gardner got the first. Because of Wayne, Wollongong led the national news. Included in Australia’s bicentennial celebrations, Wayne and Donna had breakfast with Prime Minister Bob Hawke at Kirribilli House on Australia Day, and met the Prince and Princess of Wales at the Royal Bicentennial Concert at the Sydney Opera House.
The NSW Government held a state reception in his honour.
‘I was at the Australian F1 Grand Prix in Adelaide, riding, doing a display thing, when Bob Barnard came up to me and said, “I’ve got an idea,”’ Gardner recalled. ‘He wanted to run a world championship Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix.’
‘“What circuit?” I asked. “Phillip Island,” he replied. “Where the fuck is that?” I said. I’d never heard of it. We went down after Adelaide, just for a look. There was a little control tower, a lot of grass, sheep everywhere. “Is this it?” I asked.
‘“Yep,” he said. Then we went for a walk around. It was a very good track.’
Barnard needed Gardner’s help.
‘He asked me to lobby government and media and within the sport,’ Gardner remembered. ‘There was no money involved. I didn’t get paid. I just wanted to see the race in Australia. I believed being a world champion had to stand for something.’
‘Wayne worked his butt off,’ Donna said. He arranged for Honda to lend Barnard bikes for display. He took time out of his season to make guest appearances. He hosted Barnard and his entourage at world championship rounds and introduced them to the right people.
He was battling to retain his title. The 1988 bike was ‘a bucket of shit’. He rode its wheels off, crashed regularly and finished a frustrated second to Eddie Lawson. But he stayed loyal to Honda, and felt it should have been reciprocated.
‘Honda asked me to get Mick Doohan for the team,’ Wayne recalled. ‘I rang him from South America and asked him. He said, “Wow, yeah.” Then they gave Mick my crew chief Jeremy Burgess, and assigned Jerry’s assistant Stuart Shenton to me.’
Then Honda hired Eddie Lawson, Gardner’s number one rival, to join the team without telling Gardner. From Gardner’s standpoint, it was a cold, hard slap in the face.
Gardner was embattled, the pressure huge. He and Donna had planned to marry at the end of the ’88 season: ‘We wrote a prenup on a table napkin in a little cafe,’ Donna said. ‘I needed to make it clear I didn’t want his money.’ The proposed wedding day came and went, postponed for a season.
Gardner spent the Australian summer doing media, promoting the Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix. Barnard had come through. The totally rebuilt Phillip Island track had been allocated second-round status in the 1989 world championship.
But first there was Japan, round one.
‘I rode my balls off,’ Gardner said, smiling at his intentional double entendre. He was the fastest Honda, but that still wasn’t as quick as Yamaha and Suzuki. ‘My goal was Eddie. I had to finish in front of him.’ Leading Lawson, Gardner ran off the track in a huge tank slapper. He stayed on the bike but landed heavily on his groin. Lawson beat him to the podium, and the grand prix medico Dr Claudio Costa seriously considered removing his left testicle.
Gardner flew back to Australia with Channel Nine reporters Barry Sheene (twice world champion, living in Australia) and Darrell Eastlake. ‘They were amused. I kept asking the steward for ice to put down the front of my pants. When Baz and Daz told him why, he was even more helpful.’
Australian Grand Prix week was a circus. Instead of giving Phillip Island his maximum attention, Gardner did media, all of it—talk shows, inane questions, well-meaning queues of well- wishers, corporates. Gardner, Mick Doohan and Yamaha rider Kevin Magee, the three prominent Australians, inaugurated the track for TV on Thursday. ‘The only upside was that when I got pulled over by the cops driving back to Cowes, they let me off.’
In Saturday practice, he was taken out by slow-moving German rider Michael Rudroff, the ‘Eddie the Eagle’ of bike racing. ‘He’s actually a nice guy,’ Wayne conceded. ‘I was going to punch him, but realised I was probably on TV.’ Gardner ran back to the pits, got his spare bike, and put it on the front row of the grid.
*
The first Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix is the classic. Wayne Gardner, on his Honda, won a race-long four-way duel by just 0.35 seconds from a brace of Yamahas. The lead had changed eighteen times. Lawson was fifth. Doohan, the lever Donna pulled to motivate her man in their pit caravan, was eighth, his hand stitched after a practice crash. Pole-sitter Kevin Schwantz crashed on the first corner. The Island’s pernicious character was already evident.
‘I never took a breath that last lap,’ Donna said down the phone. ‘I just wanted to see him come around the last turn. I was like Jello inside.’ And then she was running, dressed for success in a black dress crafted by Australian Barry Taff ’s fashion label Covers (‘I’ve still got it’) and black snakeskin-pattern sneakers. Her feet seemed never to touch the ground as she ran out into no-man’s land and up the main straight towards Gardner, seizing his helmeted head, screaming, ‘You did it, you did it!’ The team had boosted her over the fence. No decorum. The image of Donna and Wayne’s moment is etched in motorcycle history.
The track invasion was huge: ‘We want Wayne!’ Bob Barnard in sports coat and tie was on the podium directly beneath Wayne. Wayne doused him with a bucketload of champagne from above. It must have been some night, I suggested. There was a pause from Wayne and a silence from Donna on the phone. Then Donna: ‘He said, “Don, you go home.” I waited all night, and he didn’t come. About one a.m. I went to bed. He came home the next day. I wasn’t included.’
There is no embarrassment, at least not outwardly. They are long since divorced. ‘We are now the best of mates,’ they agree.
*
Bob Barnard built the new Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit, but Wayne Gardner enabled it. They did the same at Eastern Creek International Raceway (now Sydney Motorsport Park). Both world-class permanent tracks have hosted world championship events.
‘I tell the story to the car crowd, and they shake their heads [in incredulity],’ Jeremy Burgess—Australian motorcycle crew chief for Gardner, Doohan and Valentino Rossi, and surely our most capped and yet unsung motorsport hero—told me. ‘But it’s true. Without Wayne Gardner, we would not have either circuit.’
Extracted from Phillip Island by John Smailes.
Phillip Island
by John Smailes
Phillip Island is Australia's home of motorsport. These are the untold stories of a century of racing.
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