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THE WORLD'S GREATEST BATTLER



As Australia’s first 500cc world champion, Wayne Gardner holds a special place in the annuls of motorcycling history. Terry Stevenson recently caught up with the Aussie legend to gain some insight into how it all came about.

Who could forget Wayne Gardner’s incredible tussle with the world’s best riders during Australia’s very first 500cc Grand Prix, at Phillip Island in 1989, or as defending world 500cc champion, his ongoing fight with the ungodly handling Honda NSR500 during 1988?

But it almost didn’t happen after an unavoidable incident in 1983, during the Dutch TT, at Assen. A Honda Great Britain rider, it was Gardner’s very first ride at Grand Prix level and his racing career almost ended right there! On the second lap of the premier race, the then current 500cc world champion Franco Uncini highsided his Suzuki RG500 on the exit of a corner. Kenny Roberts and Jack Middleburg managed to dodge Uncini but, following closely behind, Gardner didn’t see Uncini in the middle of the track until it was too late. Gardner took avoiding action to miss the Italian, who at the same time began running off the track, directly into the path of his bike. Uncini’s helmet collided with the front fork leg of Gardner’s Honda RS500 triple, splitting the world champion’s helmet and sending him flying like a rag doll. Unconscious, many thought Uncini had been killed. Gardner, who injured his hand and foot in his resultant crash takes up the story, “I couldn’t avoid him. I ended up in hospital, and I visited him in hospital and he was in a coma and, mate, it was the greatest shock I’ve ever had! I was ready to retire at that point in time! I cried the whole way back to the UK from Assen, but fortunately I had good friends around me. Franco came out of his coma and got better and I went out at Donington, I cleaned up again. What I took out of it was a respect for danger, and for the sport. So you take your good out of the bad.” Uncini made a full recovery.

Better Days
Gardner performed outstandingly well in his early racing years in Australia, winning two (1980 and 1982) prestigious Castrol 6 Hour races on production bikes. He won the last Swann Series Superbike race at Sandown, catching the eye of Mamoru Moriwaki, who took Gardner to Daytona where he finished fourth in the 1981 Superbike race on the Moriwaki Kawasaki. They followed the bike to England and he won, “I beat Crosby and everybody! Crosby’s good fun. In fact I emulated my career on him. I watched what he did and how he made it quite successful and I really just copied his success. I noticed he did wheelies and entertained the crowds, so I did wheelies and entertained the crowds. They asked me to stay in the UK and then I was signed up by Honda the following year.”

After a season on the Moriwaki Kawasaki the Australian immediately made an impact, winning the 1983 British TT F1 and British Streetbike championships for Honda. Gardner funded his own way to ride five 500cc Grand Prix, costing some $40,000 on Honda Britain’s production RS500, gaining fourth place in his first ride and closing the 1984 season in seventh.

The next year he went full-time Grand Prix racing as Freddie Spencer’s team-mate, riding a factory V-3 compared with the American’s more powerful V-4. Gardner finished fourth in the title chase. Other wins Gardner picked up included the first of his four Suzuka 8 Hour races in Japan, with fans dubbing him ‘Mr Hundred Percent’. He won the Australian Swann Series for the second time running.

Spencer left Gardner to carry the weight of HRC on his shoulders. His ‘disappearance’ left another legacy that would haunt the company for several years, as Honda wouldn’t listen to the less experienced Gardner when he told them the NSR wasn’t handling properly. Despite this, it all came good for Garner in 1987, when he won the world 500cc championship. “Freddie was meant to be the main focus for Honda that year but, through various issues, he really wasn’t there. So I had to wear the responsibility for Honda Motor Corporation and, ready for it or not, I just had to approach it with as much determination and commitment and focus as I could. There was obviously quite a bit of pressure. The bike wasn’t real good that year, same as ’88. But I got in there, tried hard - I nearly broke a couple of times. The bike was difficult to ride so that made my job twice as hard!
“Yes, I did surprise myself. So, with the added pressure of carrying Honda on my back, and the might of the team and everybody else around me, I was surprised how well I actually came through with the whole thing!”

Bucking Broncos
Gardner struggled but learnt to ride around the NSR’s handling issues. “The bike was very hard to ride in the years I was there - extremely hard to ride. In ’86, ’87, ’88 and ’89, the bike was a mess! And Honda, at that point in time, had no idea how to build a chassis!”

Incredibly, HRC found another way to solve their problems after Gardner parked next to the Suzuki pit! “They saw the Suzuki garage up and they could get the shot side-on, and they sat there all day and took photos of the Suzuki with its clothes off, back in 1989, through the mirrored windows of my motor home! They rolled off rolls and rolls of film, took that back to Japan, blew it up to full size and measured everything. They realised their theory was wrong, to push the engine down low, that is why they had the upside down motorbikes (fuel tanks below the engine).”

Gardner won the world 500cc championship on the bucking NSR500 V-4 in 1987, but the bike was much worse in 1989. “They went backwards in ’88. They pushed everything down further and it just handled like a pig, you ask Jerry (Burgess, Gardner’s ’87 Crew Chief and Valentino Rossi’s current Crew Chief) about that. Even in ’87 it was struggling. ’86, ’87, ’88, it was a piece of shit! After those photos of that Suzuki in 1989, they realised that they were screwing up and that is when, in ’89 and ’90, the bikes started getting better. Because that is when they started cutting and hacking chassis and they went, “Oh, we have been making a big mistake”, and that was HRC. That’s a true story and that is when Honda started getting good, when they copied Suzuki!”
Before ’89 Gardner wasn’t permitted to change anything on the bike either. “In fact I wasn’t even allowed to use different brakes until the day the disc blew up! I was braking that hard the disc flew apart at Spa and pieces of the disc went flying through the fairing and I had no brakes! I managed to come in with one disc missing. So then they decided to think about trying Brembos.”

Gardner may well have won more titles if HRC had listened to him or if he’d signed with another brand as defending world champion, which he nearly did. “Yes, it was Yamaha, Kenny Roberts’ team, and in hindsight now a big mistake. I should have done it! I didn’t, and I regret it now because the Yamaha was by far a superior bike and I think it would have done my riding style a lot of good and been a lot safer, having a more softer power delivery curve.”

Instead he re-signed with Honda. “My loyalty to the brand and listening to too many promises at the time - that never eventuated. In other words, listening to commitment that was never in writing and they never fulfilled. They never showed me any respect, which goes to show you are just a number, you are not one of the family.”
Certainly an issue Valentino Rossi endured, and long-term Honda man Nicky Hayden has discovered. “Look at all the Honda riders, that happens to them all so I totally understand what Valentino is about and we all have the same comment - even Eddie talks about Honda in the same way!”

Another Legend
Wayne Gardner’s 500cc world title instigated the Australian 500 Grand Prix, held at Phillip Island for the first few years. “From that point of view I feel like I have been a pioneer in some aspects of the whole thing, and am still very proud of that.”
The Australian rates his victories in the 1989 and 1990 Phillip Island races as his best ever. If you can, buy a DVD of them!

“The most difficult was winning the second one (1990), where I had a broken wrist and the fairing was hanging off the bike and I went into the race to actually pull in after five laps with a broken scaphoid bone! I had 25 injections in my wrist, I had painkillers and did everything I could. Five laps into the race the plan was to pull in, but I’d seen Doohan out in the lead and I thought, ‘I can’t have that, I can’t give up my crown to Mick’, so I just swallowed the gritty pill and I was going to have a go. I took off and fought the pain and came across and won it! How the hell I did that, I have no idea! Dr Costa didn’t know, and neither did I. It was one of those outer-body experiences, so it was very special. I can’t explain to you what happened!”

He won his last race the day he announced his 2001 retirement, the British GP. After retiring from motorcycle racing Gardner took up car racing, firstly in the Aussie V8 series where he placed third at Bathurst in 1993 and 1995, then spent five successful years racing Toyotas in the GT Series in Japan before permanently retiring in 2002. “I did really well, I won races, I qualified on pole at Bathurst - led the race at Bathurst, so it certainly wasn’t lack of talent. I proved to myself I could be as good as anybody here. What did wear me out was the politics, unfortunately I ended up with, as a team owner, but the politics drove me insane!”

Mr Hundred Percent happily tells one of his funniest stories during his career. During a car race in snow conditions in Japan, Gardner came in after doing long demonstration wheelies on a Moriwaki Kawasaki for his legion of Japanese fans. With a race coming up he had to quickly change in the back of the team truck. “I’d taken my leathers off, and I’m sitting on a drum in my boxer shorts with my legs wide open, and it was freezing cold. One of the brollie girls walks in and says “Wayne-san, so big willie Wayne-san” and I closed my legs and said, “Excuse me?”, and she said, “Wayne-san, so big willie” - willie on motorbike” and I said, “Oh, so big wheelie!”
“So I am known over there as Big Willie Wayne-san. Even though it was a cold day, it made me feel very proud for a while, until I realised what she was talking about.”

Nowadays, Gardner has two properties he lives in, a motorcycle import business and a property development company.

Gardner may be a Member of the Order of Australia (OAM), have won ABC Australian Sportsman of the Year and earned several other accolades, but today he lives for his two boys, Remy (10) and Luca (8). Both are just starting out in dirt track. “Look, winning a world title is all very nice, and winning races all around the world has been great, but really it all comes down to your family. They are the most important thing, and they are my best trophies I’ve got!”

Watch out for them in the future! “In fact I’m looking at a new bike downstairs we bought for them. We are winning the odd championship and you name it at the moment.”