Cape Town – Once a year cars are banned from the Killarney international racing circuit for a day.
The All Bike Race Day is a festival of two-wheeled racing with categories for type of motorcycle you can think of and at least one that you won’t. It’s right at the end of the season and not for points (all the Regional championships have been settled anyway) so strategy goes out of the window in favour of riding for pride, and to settle old rivalries.
The 2014 edition, run on the Day of Reconciliation, was no exception, delivering thrill and spills with electrifying racing in every heat and more changes of lead than a dressage contest, in some of the closest racing of the season.
The headline event, the Cape’s only endurance race for full-sized motorcycles, was unusual in that the top three finishers were solo riders rather than teams of two – but it pitched the region’s top two racers against each other head to head in a thrilling clash that went down to the wire and beyond.
Because the one rider who can usually show a clean pair of tailpipes to Namibian import Ronald Slamet, holder of back-to-back Mike Hopkins Regional titles, is his predecessor, former SA Supersport champion and current World Superstock star David ‘McFlash’ McFadden.
Each was on a near-stock Kawasaki ZX-10R, with nothing but pride at stake - and the first surprise came when Slamet out-qualified his nemesis to take pole, albeit by just 0.127sec, with Sharl Wasserfall (Honda CBR1000RR), 1.4 seconds off the pace.
LE MANS START
But it was McFlash who got the better of the traditional sprint-across-the-track Le Mans start (maybe his background as a personal trainer had something to do with that!) as he grabbed a tenuous lead, with Slamet all over him like a rash.
They were followed by Trevor Westman on the seven-year-old Ocean Sizzler R1, Brandon Haupt, who was sharing his brand-new MX Clean ZX-10R with his brother Bernard, Wasserfall and Warren ‘Starfish’ Guantario, who got a cracker of a start on the RST ER650 he was sharing with British-based RST bikewear boss Jonny Towers.
Throughout the first half-hour the two leaders were never more than a couple of bike-lengths apart, circulating consistently at less than 1m13s in what looked like a sprint race rather than a one-hour enduro, lapping everybody up to and including Wasserfall, who was promoted to fourth when Westman’s battered war-horse went lame after 10 laps and to third when Haupt had a moment on lap 13.
After the compulsory two-minute pit-stops, which had to be within five minutes either way of the half-hour since competitors weren’t allowed to ride longer than 35 minutes without a break, Slamet grabbed a slender lead that he held to the end, despite McFadden’s best efforts, which saw him on the same lap, just 36 seconds adrift, when the flag came out after 47 laps of flat-out racing.
Wasserfall completed 46 laps in 60 minutes to finish third, with the Haupt brothers fourth on 44 and the RST ER650 fifth, having reeled off 43 laps in 60 minutes despite giving away two cylinders, 350cc and at least 80kW – but perhaps the unluckiest competitor of all was veteran Jan-Lucas de Vos, who rode solo and was running fourth until two minutes from the end when his Kawasaki ZX-10R ran out of fuel and limped into the pits.
Even then, a penalty could have turned the result on its ear, but in the event both Slamet and McFadden were penalised one lap each for speeding in pit lane, leaving their final positions unchanged.
UNLIMITED SUPERBIKES
The earlier eight-lap races for Unlimited Superbikes must have seemed like a dress rehearsal for the One-Hour, with Slamet qualifying on pole, just 0.094sec ahead of McFadden and 0.177 faster than former Regional champion Malcolm Rapson, also on a ZX-10R.
McFlash grabbed the lead in Race 1, however, and was leading Slamet by 0.146sec with Rapson a further 2.294sec adrift when Jacques Brits crashed out of 10th on lap five, bringing out the red flags and the ambulance.
The restart over four laps saw Slamet romp home five seconds clear of McFadden to take the win on aggregate, with Rapson third ahead of Brandon Haupt, Andre Calvert (Kawasaki ZX-6R) and De Vos.
Race 2 was a cliff-hanger as Slamet chased McFadden for all he was worth throughout eight thrilling laps, finally passing the World Superstock star on the final lap to grab the win by a scant 0.034sec.
Rapson came home 13 seconds adrift, just ahead of Haupt after an intriguing tussle for third, followed by Calvert and born-again racer John Oliver (Glass It R6), rapidly re-learning old skills after a five-year retirement.
Everybody thought Guantario would have it all his own way after he qualified the Calberg ER650 on pole, almost a second quicker than Towers on the RST machine, but he got it very, very wrong on lap two and wound up down in 14th.
What followed was the chase of a lifetime as he cut through the midfield to finish sixth, posting the fastest lap of the race (1m19.973s) on the last time round, while Towers and JP Friederich (Calberg SV650) battled it out for the lead, with Towers ehead by just 0.033sec (the closest finish of the day) when it mattered.
Towers got the holeshot at the start of Race 2 but Guantario was having none of it, blitzing the visitor on lap two and walking away to a five-second margin by the flag, with Towers followed home at a respectful distance by Friederich, Andrew Liebenberg (Calberg ER650) and John Kosterman on a Suzuki GSX-R750 ‘Pre-Sling’, the fastest of the classic superbikes by a comfortable margin.
Almost all the CBR150s entered in the lightweight race had completed the 8 Hour only three days earlier, but that didn’t stop them from going flat out in this rare opportunity to stretch their legs on the main circuit.
Pre-race favourite Towers qualified on pole but was blitzed on lap one by Tony Sterianos, teenager Kewyn Snyman and suspension guru Martin Paetzold, on the only two-stroke in the race. A lap later Sterianos was unceremoniously demoted to third by Snyman and Paetzold, just before David Enticott and Mark van der Walt went down hard on the same lap.
The race was red-flagged while the debris was cleared; the re-start over six laps saw a superb three-way dice for the lead between Snyman, Sterianos and Towers that saw them cutting each other up into every corner, swopping positions on every lap and finishing - in that order - within less than half a second.
Sterianos led from Snyman and Towers at the start of Race 2 - until Towers blitzed them both on lap two, only to be mugged a lap later by Snyman, who was putting his short-circuit experience to good use in only his second outing on the main circuit.
Another no-holds-barred three-way battle ensued, but neither of the veterans was able to make a move on Snyman that would stick and he led home Towers and Sterianos in a photo finish that saw them all covered by 0.184sec.
Meanwhile, 16 seconds back, Paetzold, a five-times SA 250cc champion in his day, got into a ding-dong for fourth with 14-year-old Jarryd Butler – who just happens to be his nephew! – that saw him hold off the younger rider until the start of the last lap, when Butler out-braked him comprehensively into Turn 1 and held the advantage all the way round to take fourth by 0.064sec.
The rules for this race had been tightened to exclude anybody who had previously held a main-circuit competition, thus ruling out the has-beens in favour of the wannabees.
Four of them - Gavin Louw (BMWS1000 RR), Dominique Arlove (Suzuki GSX-R1000), Shamier Alexander (Yamaha R6) and Shawn Payne (Suzuki GSX-R750) – got into it in Race 1, passing and re-passing each other in some very unfamiliar places – but in the end it was Louw who beat Arlove to the line by 0.333sec, with Alexander and Payne third and fourth respectively, six seconds later, less than a second apart.
Payne took it to the leaders again in Race 2, leading off the line until he was mugged on lap two by lap Louw and Arlove. Louw eventually opened a small but crucial lead, coming home three seconds ahead of a superb dice between Payne and Arlowe that ended with the Suzuki less than half a second ahead when it counted.
Wesley Procter (BMW S1000 RR), fifth in Race 1, finished a lonely fourth, well clear of Alexander and Ruhaan Cloete (Suzuki GSX-R1000) who battled it out all the way to come home only 0.304sec apart.
ADVENTURE BIKES
A first for Killarney, the two races for big dual-purpose tourers showed them to be unexpectedly agile in the right hands and very fast out of corners - even the ones carrying full touring luggage!
By far the most athletic of the bikes was Attie Hofmeyr’s KTM 1190R - but he’d reckoned without BMW’s secret weapon, celebrated off-road instructor and BMW fundi John Carr, now nearer 60 than 50 but who’d been a national circuit-racing winner back in the day.
Carr qualified one of the new liquid-cooled R1200 GS beetle-crushers on pole, albeit by a margin of just 0.039sec, and swooped places with the Katoom on almost every lap, but experience told when the last-lap chips were down and Carr was ahead by 0.143sec at the line, almost thirty seconds clear of the field.
No rider of orange motorcycles was about to take that without a riposte, however, and Hofmeyr went out for Race 2 like a man on a mission. It took him three laps, but he passed the big Beemer on lap four, held Carr at bay for three laps, lost the lead on lap seven and struck back to take the race win by half a second – and the overall victory for the day by just 0.261 seconds.