2009 6 Hour – Race Report from Dailybike.com

The farewell race at Sydney’s Oran Park, the Bel-Ray 6-Hour, served up endurance racing delights in spades to everyone who braved the all-day-long hellish heat and the wind which picked up in the afternoon.

If, as they say, anything can happen in racing, in endurance racing it usually does. Pitstops bring competitors passed many laps ago back like zombies. Even crashes don’t guarantee someone will stay out of the way, and after a racer has pulled in and climbed off the bike, it’s only to rest, not to call it a day.

Because of the pitstops, crash repairs and safety car periods constantly shuffling and compressing the field, endurance racing makes for great watching. Someone’s always putting the pass on someone, there’s always a seven-bike freight train somewhere on the track, and because there’s hours and hours of non-stop racing on the menu, there’s no real need to hold off on going to the bog or the snack car – they’ll still be racing when you come back.

Saturday’s qualifying performance, and the resumes of the riders and teams, put outright victory – and the none-too-shabby $10,000 winners’ purse – within reasonable reach of five teams: the pole-getters from team Big Kahuna Racing on the #63 black 2009 R1, Demolition Plus on the #36 Fireblade built by Geoff Winzer, Dean Evans’ Revolution team on the Rob Halcroft-built #1 R1, race organiser James Spence’s own The 6-Hour team on the #6 R1, and Team Green 2 with their #96 ZX-10R.

Clocking up 277 laps completed by the fall of the chequered flag, it was Demolition Plus’ crew of Russell Holland, Craig Coxhell and Gareth Jones which triumphed with a convincing three-lap margin over Big Kahuna Racing’s Grant Hay, Zac Davies and Dan Stauffer, who managed the race’s fastest lap, a 1:10:994. A further three laps back, The 6-Hour team’s trio of James Spence, Warwick Nowland and David Johnson outdistanced the Revolution team pairing of the Cudlin brothers, Damian and Alex, by just over 36 seconds.

Fifth was taken by a Kawasaki ZX-10R, but by the #10 bike of Team Green, with Mark Hatch, Jason Kain and Rod Taplin aboard, not the #96 machine of Jamie Aitken, Michael McMillan and Murray Clark. They finished just a lap outside top ten after, Murray Clark, the senior rider in the team, lowsided exiting the downhill turn 7. 20 minutes were lost getting the bike back to the pits and repaired. Team manager Paul Aitken was philosophical about the result, confident that, if not for the crash, the team’s strategy of hour-long stints would have brought them victory against the competition’s 45-minute stints. Team Green’s fifth place, however, was achieved on a 1000cc production bike, rather than a more – albeit slightly more – modified Superstock machine. They beat home an even 10 1000cc Superstock teams.

Clark’s crash was the most pivotal of a low total of six crashes for the full six hours of racing. Only half of those six triggered periods of safety car, and only three of the fallers were unable to continue. All but one, though, were at turn 7. Team AMCN, on the #19 GSX-R750, already handicapped by being lumped into the 1000cc Superstock class with R1’s, ZX-10R’s, GSX-R1000’s, and Fireblades, had to effect extensive repairs after Bill Kontominas lowsided, and the bike cartwheeled when it ran off the track. They lost a whopping 114 laps in repairs, had to prize the cooling fan off the exhaust headers during pitstops, and finished last, but they finished.

Rock Solid Security’s #47 R1, which found the turn 7 infield soon after Kontominas, was destroyed and left where it lay until a safety car could be called for an incident which left a bike repairable and worth hurrying for. Rider Roy Gay spent a worrying amount of time curled up in a ball where he landed, but got up and onto the recovery scooter on his own power. Last Minute Racing’s #17 bike, and the #51 machine of Clubman Motorcycles, both R1’s were the others who DNF’d through crashes.

The adoption of Irish road racing’s idea of a motorcycle-mounted medic to access fallen riders by the trackside fast didn’t pan out; he crashed exiting turn 4 on his way to one of the fallers at turn 7 at the 1-hour mark and had to sit out the rest of the event.

Air temperatures in the natural bowl of the Oran Park site were nudging 40 degrees all day. On track, it would’ve been much hotter, making the race a real test of the racebikes and the racers. Oil was seen to be topped up on many a bike during pitstops. Accepting their trophy for 2nd place in the Production 1000cc class, Team Bikesmith’s Simon Thomas spoke of the team’s 2006 R1 temp gauge hovering around 115 degrees on the track. The Hog’s Breath Heroes team’s #35 carburetted R6, the joint-oldest bike in the field, soldiered on through the latter half of the race with a blown head gasket before a crash at the turn 10/11 flip-flop put them out of business with just over an hour to go.

The #58 Benelli TnT gave team Italian Stallion a couple of anxious moments, with a sticking, overheated clutch stalling the bike on approach to a pitstop, followed by the sleeve on the single undertail muffler failing soon after – they finished the race in 18th place in terms of laps run, and would’ve been the runaway winner had there been a decibel category.

One bike which just ran its race and scrubbed up as clean at the end as the moment it was wheeled off the trailer to start practice was the #9 Harley XR1200 of Sy’s Harley-Davidson. Smoked down the straight by bikes with literally twice its power, the Harley finished 15th.

Team Cessnock deserve special mention. They ran race number 46 because, as rider Phil Chapman said, that’s the average age of the team’s three riders, not because they’re Rossi fans, and they ran it on a 115hp naked bike which they then proceeded to ride home into 8th spot, just behind the “big” teams, and 3rd in the Production class. Production, indeed. Their KTM Superduke ran stock pipes.

Apart from Superstock 1000 – won by the outright winners, Holland, Coxhell and Jones – and the Production 1000 – Hatch, Kain and Davies, there was a matching pair of 600cc classes.

The production 600 class was a bit of a non-event, with only two entries and a single finisher. The Silverback Racers team of Steve Fisher, Andrew Grover, Andy Garrett and Steve Warr, brought their #22 R6 home in next-to-last place overall. Their competitors in the class, the Radguard Australia team of Laurie and Matthew Fyffe and Ted McGowan, were poised for a strong finish when their #32 GSX-R600 cruelly expired with only 14 minutes to go to the chequered flag./p>

The Superstock 600 class saw the closest finish of the day. Dailybike’s friends of team Astute – Sam Ayliffe and brothers James and Kevin Corcoran, riding the other carburetted R6 in the field, scored the fastest Superstock 600 lap, a 1:18.735, and came from over a minute behind in the last half-hour stint of the race to pip the #66 R6 of the Bega-based Mick Cole Motorcycles team by only 3.388 seconds, a tough outcome for a team which struggled through some of the worst luck of the weekend. They spent Friday night rebuilding their R6 after it was heavily damaged in a practice crash which also sent their #3 rider, 38-year-old Paul Neal, to Liverpool Hospital with broken ribs and vertebrae. Rather than call it a day at one badly hurt mate, the team called up a replacement, James – his name doesn’t appear on the timesheets – who drove up from Bega to Sydney that night to run in qualifying.

Their experience is the essence of endurance racing, what World Endurance’s Russell Benney, principal of the multiple-world-champion Phase One team puts as, “It’s OK if you crash, but you must bring the bike back. Doesn’t matter if your arms are broken; drag it with your teeth.” Once committed to, the race is seen through, come hell, high water, or a wrecked bike and a mate in hospital. Next time there’s one of these on, it needs to be supported. At the post-race presentation, Warwick Nowland, whose pool room at home features a World Endurance champion’s trophy, spoke of the festival-like rounds of the FIM competition, and the possibility we might have that here. With the strong showing put on to farewell Oran Park, let’s hope we’re on the FIM’s radar for a round. 24 Heurs de Winton, anyone? You can make as much of a racket at you’d like.

Click here to see more photos from The 6 Hour Race.

Articles from Dailybike.com. Posted: 23 November 2009. Story: Marko Alat

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