There was plenty of eye candy to be seen and appreciated at the weekend’s third annual MotoFest at Hampton Downs, the biggest annual motorcycling spectacle on the Kiwi race calendar.
The Mike Pero-sponsored MotoFest again shared the programme with the third round of five in the 2020 New Zealand Superbike Championships (NZSBK) and that meant there were racing superstars galore, both old and young, everywhere you looked around the North Waikato race track.
On hand were such notable individuals as Waikato’s multi-time former road-racing world champion Hugh Anderson; Masterton’s former New Zealand and Australian superbike champion, three-time Suzuka Eight-Hour winner and World Superbike Championships (WSBK) front-runner Aaron Slight and renowned former MotoGP engineer, electronics expert and bike tuner Paul Treacy, from Wellington, to name a few.
Kiwi legend Aaron Slight, reunited with the Honda RC45, one of the bikes that helped propel him to be among the top of the world’s superbike rankings in the 1990s. Photo by Andy McGechan, BikesportNZ.com
The “Legends’ Garage” was corralled together by Auckland’s multi-time former champion Graeme Crosby, himself a world-famous figure on the road-racing scene.
“Croz”, as he’s affectionately called, raced all around the world in the 1980s and holds the distinction of being the only person to have won the Daytona 200, the Imola 200, the Suzuka 8-Hour endurance race and the Isle of Man TT.
Well-known Kiwi businessman Mike Pero, again a key sponsor of MotoFest at Hampton Downs, took the opportunity to get out on the track on what is a genuine factory Yamaha YZR500 that was raced by Australian Grand Prix star Kevin McGee.
Irrepressible Australian Robbie Phillis, a former team-mate of Slight’s on the WSBK scene in the 1990s, was also hanging around the Legends’ Garage, along with Christchurch former GP racer Stu Avant, Kiwi former WSBK front-runner Gary Goodfellow and nine-time New Zealand superbike champion Andrew Stroud, the Hamilton man who raced the famous Kiwi-built Britten motorcycle to world acclaim back in the 1990s.
Former national champion Mike Pero, pictured here heading out on the genuine factory Yamaha YZR500 that was formerly raced by Australian Grand Prix star Kevin McGee. Photo by Andy McGechan, BikesportNZ.com
It is also worth noting that four-time road-racing world champion Anderson will be inducted in the MotoGP Hall of Fame later this year.
Anderson made his first GP appearances in the 500cc and 350cc classes in 1960, taking a podium in the latter. Two years later he added the 125cc and 50cc classes to his curriculum vitae, becoming a race winner in both. That set his course and for 1963, when Anderson took on the 125cc and 50cc World Championships, eventually winning the title in both categories.
He retained the 50cc crown the following year to make it back-to-back titles and was third in the 125cc title fight, reversing that in 1965 as he regained the 125cc crown and was third in the 50cc class. Anderson retired in 1966 after taking an impressive 25 Grand Prix wins and four titles in just six years and Kiwi sporting legends don’t come much greater than this man.
© Words and photos by Andy McGechan, BikesportNZ.com
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Speaking of legends … they don’t come much bigger than Graeme “Croz” Crosby. A central figure in the Legends Garage at Hampton Downs. Photo by Andy McGechan, BikesportNZ.com