PetrolheadBy LINDSAY TUFFINHer eyes sparkled. Off to the island are yuh? How can you tell? Leather's a dead giveaway. Ah ... but appearances can be deceptive ... I'm a faux biker ... just looking the part ... We are at Caldermeade Farm about 100kms out of Melbourne; having bacon and eggs, fuel for a weekend of petrolhedonism. The eggs are free range from the farm ... and what a farm. Next to the cafe in which we munch is the massive rotolactor dairy extracting the creamy gold from 400 cows. How things have changed since beloved brother and I helped milk (sometimes by hand if the power went out, the 30-odd cows in the little ramshackle dairy backing on to the (selectively-logged-old-growth) bush at the back of Burnie. The eggs are good. And the coffee, two double hits hit the spot. The bacon hits the tum. Then the cash hits the counter and the conversation about Phillip Island continues. What do you know about the island? I was a grid marshall there for four years .. superbikes, GP, supercars. Loved it. Are you going this year? Nuh, gotta work. I assume she wonders why I'm dressed in leather and driving to the island in the front seat of brother's Saab. I need, or assume I need, to give her an explanation. Perhaps it is part of the confessional instinct. For there is in human beings what appears to be an instinctive desire to own up. Well, that's what cops tell me. So do priests. So does my mate when I'm crying into my beer. (a not infrequent occurrence). Perhaps this is all part of latent narcissicism, the Look-at-Me response so beloved of naughty celebrities as they detail their sordid peccadilloes to an open-mouthed chat show audience, the angelic loved one who saved them looking on ... So, the sins are volunteered in this fleeting encounter with the Caldermeade Farm Girl-Behind-The-Counter. I might be dressed like a biker. Well, I am a biker - detailing with macho pride the ownership of two ratty but gorgeous two-wheeled monsters. So,why aren't you on one of them? Random Breath Test. The ageing wild child is grounded. This is received not with the conventional response of my (older) generation raised on law-defying revhedonism.Bastards got me, fuck 'em .... Her response appears to be typical of her generation: This is not clever, you're stupid. Drink ride, bloody idiot ... I am to be haunted by those words all weekend as that bloody slogan seems to be everywhere at Phillip Island. But her attitude is a far more sensible hard-wiring than the patterns laid down in my young adulthood ... and repeated in peter pan middle age. We smile and part and brother and I head over the bridge to the island to set up camp. Phillip Island perches at the bottom of mainland Australia looking out over windswept Bass Strait where the whitecaps bear testimony to high winds and tumultuous seas. The island is a natural race circuit, laid out before the advent of computer-generated modern circuit formulations. It rises and falls. It has on- and off-camber corners, a vicious blind rise, glorious sweepers and a 330km/h straight where the MotoGP bikes top out faster than Michael Schumacher's Ferrari. It is here the masses pay homage to the demi-gods of motorcycle racing. They earn this worship. Although the rewards are immense the risks are enormous. Like death - two racers have been killed in Australia in the past two seasons - or permanent injury (former elite class world champ Wayne Rainey gets around in a wheelchair). The risks are illustrated spectacularly on Saturday when Aussie 250cc racer Anthony West skids into Turn 1 and is hurled into the air at 270km/h. He is like a rag doll, arms and legs akimbo and at the mercy of whatever gods watch over racing motorcyclists. He lands sickeningly and injures his one good arm - the other arm was already broken from a jarring crash the previous week. He can't race on Sunday. These are tough bastards ... 21st century gladiators who control immense power with safecracker's-sure-touch fractional adjustments of the throttle, clasped by the right fist, two fingers of which hook around the front brake lever to haul the GP1 bikes down from their stratospheric speeds to heel over into corners at impossible angles, adhesion maintained by fractional contact between sticky rubber and tarmac. One slight misjudgement and it may all be over ... there is no F1 cockpit cacoon to keep you safe, just a leather skin and a helmet. Then there is the noise. The GP1 bikes create a monstrous cacophony, but there is aural beauty in the de-celeration cackle of the beautiful red Ducati's V4 twin-pulse engine. Phillip Island is a world all its own; an expression of subterranean biker culture with some bizarre permutations. The campsites diminish in raucous expression the further from the racetrack. We camp at Highside, a kilometre from the 24-hour-party Trackside camp where a mountain of crushed stubbies bears witness to the human spirit's desperate need to noisily trash itself. But it is also a refuge of creativity. Bikers stand around log fires getting very loose. There is singing, strange games of football - how to head a full stubby - and in one enclave a bizarre expression of some form of pagan worship where a biker stands in the middle of the mob, sits on a chair, a box is placed over him, straw is added, various other accoutrements attached... and at the end of this - as the blow-up doll applauds - the beast rises to the acclamation , It's alive, It's alive. Very strange. Then there is the group with the smoking fire over which a metal contraption steams and hisses ... Still crazy after all these years? Lounge suites are transported and placed around log fires roaring in the chilly night. A truck converted into the working man's winnebago sits next to a rig with trailer worth at least half a mil. Near Highside the night is rent by the sound of explosions as firecrackers and skyrockets explode, and a wander to the portable ablutions block passes conversations of extraordinary incoherence. Pocket bikes race up the gravel road; there are amazing trikes, one powered by a massive V8. This is not a place to bring out the running lycra and go for the daily 10ks. And it's most important to remember to firmly attach Personality 4: G'day Mate ..., rather than Personality 8: Morning Chaps ... This is heaven or hell, depending on your theological disposition. Whenever there is high-octane top-level motorsport there is high-octane high-level expressions of a nation's might and power. At the Oz GP it's an RAAF FA-18 making passes. Very noisy, very powerful and very impressive ...but these are horrible times for so many people and you can not help but ponder how thousands have cowered from just this approaching aural horror ... whether in the wasteland of Iraq or the West Bank of Palestine. But there does not seem to be any deep reflection on these horrors from the 40,000, just awestruck wonder at how bloody marvelous this machine is. Then it's gone, straight up, vertically into the blue ... The masses awed, it's back to playtime.
You are unlikely to encounter the wisdom of Jacques Derrida, In this most macho, blokey of sports which still celebrates scantily adorned grid girls whose sole function is to be immensely cute while holding a number, the one, true Demi-God, The Prince is a charismatic, intelligent, curly haired, slim and delicately featured athlete of such prodigious gifts that he may just be the greatest motorcycle racer of all time. He is certainly the most fascinating figure in world sport. This year Italian Valentino Rossi - who once had a ballerina as a girlfriend - switched teams from the all-conquering world champion Honda Corporation - motorcycle racing's equivalent of Ferrari - taking along his predominantly Aussie crew to join perennial bridesmaid Yamaha. And in the year in which he was expected to simply bring the bike up to speed he is at Phillip Island within a chequered flag of another world title. Rossi is an insider (Dad was a GP racer). But his attitude is that of the outsider ... with the outsider's fierce determination; he is energized by challenge and adversity; there appears to be a necessity to set up the adversary with whom to joust; at this grand prix there is a feud with title rival Sete Gibernau. And what else explains his decision this year to raise his middle finger to all-powerful Honda. He is constantly mischievously jousting with racing authority, partly because he plays the eccentric prince - once taking a blow-up doll as pillion for a celebratory victory lap; just two races ago he was relegated to the back of the grid for a technical infringement, which sparked a furious winning counter-attack in the next race. For all this he is adored by his fans ... 40,000 of the 42,000 last Sunday were firmly on Rossi's side, watching with disbelief as he moto-crossed and power-slid - and with the masterful precision of a brain surgeon cut Gibernau to ribbons; his motorcycle the scalpel.. One of the great races. One of the great weekends ... if you like that sort of thing ...
The writer once finished third in a motorcycle race at Symmons Plains, passing racer legend Mal "Wally" Campbell on the inside at the Loop. That's what he chooses to remember; more likely Mal lapped him on the inside at the Loop and he finished off the podium by a considerable margin. Adoration of the Motorbike ... Valentino's Yamaha and Moi
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