Hi all. I grew up in Mt Kuring-gai just outside of Sydney on the edge of the Kuring-gai Chase, meaning we had unlimited trails to ride as a kid. Mark Housenlodge started it off - his dad bought him a minibike and after the first ride I was hooked. Friends of the family gave me a minibike frame in which I slung a 160cc Victa with zip start and off I went. Then got a Honda 50 stepthrough, then a slight leap to a MX-ised B40 Beeza (was a dumped bike which we found and cops let us keep). Keeping in the 4 banger vein, at 16 I did up a reasonably trick XL250 MX'er with all the good gear of the day - big Mikuni carb, fork extenders (wow, six inches!), and laid down the shocks at the back, CR tank and all Tahitian Red. Every weekend (and evenings during summer) off we'd dissappear down the Chase on a motley collection of bikes for hours and hours of trail fun.
This was the Hungry Creek era and the place was full of early RMs and YZs, but I was a John Banks man. Then Yamaha stole my thunder with the TT500....and a mate let me ride his YZ125X. I cound not believe what you could do on that thing. So I bought and flogged that round the trails for a year or so quite happily. I did three years in the Army and bought a brand new DT250B (C? first monoshocker - shiny blue metal tank) and rode that all round the reserves around Holsworthy army base in the late seventies. I stayed with trailies and rode bikes for a few years after that (including a fun year as a motorcycle courier in London) but eventually drifted away from bikes till me early forties when felt the need for speed again (can you blame me - we live in Canberra...).
I tried road riding for a while but too many tickets....then....like half the posters here...spotted the first edition of VMX. The rest isn't history because it took me another few months or so to con the wife into letting me blow more scarce family money on another bike but eventually had me a nice YZ465 of my own. Nice - who am I kidding, it was a total shitbox. The only thing I got out of that was a quick lesson in engine rebuilds. Flogged that and got what we all should try for - an already rebuild racer, in this case an '83 CR250. Finally I had a bike that would last a whole race day - phew! And that meant I could concentrate on working out how you actually race motocross. I found I actually really enjoy this part of it, learning new skills and stuff. Especially when the payoff is you get to be able to keep the momentum and speed up the whole race long. And lets face it, an mx track can be bloody hard work to get around, especially when you don't know the tricks of the trade and basically bang bang bang off every obstacle on the track. Much more fun when you find you can read the track and do stuff to make use of the terrain.
Thats what I've enjoyed the most, that and the mateship that goes with the whole scene. I actually got VMXMAN to thank for that. I contacted him after finding the old HEAVEN website and found he lives not far from me and that we work half a k from each other. As you can guess from his efforts with this great website/forum, he's an easy going generous guy who's there to help where he can. And did I need help. And I think we were both surprised to find we had so much in common with each other, in background and personality, which has been real nice (for me at least - another pen-pusher to share race stories with mid-week...). Aw shucks - long live vintage MX!
