My ride back was interrupted by the metabolic chain reaction of riding a fast but homemade experimental motorcycle down a racetrack after consuming a dodgy curry the night before, followed by coffee. As I leant forward to lie over the fuel tank, my brain put a bit too much effort into getting the gear changes right and forgot to maintain the clench and I passed what felt like a gram of gas. No problem, I thought, I can make it to the pits, get my leathers off and find a toilet before I lose my arse. Then it hit me. The tiny fart had expanded into a cubic metre of horrendous air that rose sharply up through my leathers and filled my helmet. I gagged, my eyes stung, the bike was passing 160 kph, I sat up and flipped open my visor in a desperate effort to breathe fresh air, nearly crashing when the wind hit my open lid and tried to rip my head off my shoulders.
Pulling up fast I leapt off, handed the bike to the boys and ran off pointing at the toilet block. Our bike passed the shakedown with flying colours, so did my curry.
That was it; everything was prepped, organised, checked, approved and ready to go. All we had to do now was wait for Speed Week to kick off in a fortnight.
I WAS WALKING
down a tree-lined street near the city towards my motorcycle having just left a meeting. It was lunchtime and West Perth was awash with business people rushing about and packing the most into one hour out of the office. Crossing the street, wondering if I got a parking ticket, past a busy al fresco restaurant, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. It was just past 1 p.m. on Friday, 9 March.
‘Hi, Paul, it’s David Hinds here.’ As soon as I heard his voice I stopped walking and closed my eyes. ‘Have I caught you at a bad time?’
‘No,’ I lied, as my mind raced through his reasons for calling me and instantly deduced that whatever his reason it was not a good thing.
‘Mate, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but Speed Week is officially canc—’
‘
Fuuuuuuucckk! Noooooooo!
’ At least half the diners jumped as I cut David off, dropped the phone and my helmet, tried to kick it and missed, which is really embarrassing and extra infuriating because when you miss on a big kick and totally disconnect in rage, the momentum will tear muscles and send your body into the air in a banana-skin slip that ends with a very sore tail bone.
Then, as I rolled onto my chest and tried to stand up, I put my palms down on the pavement pinning my neck tie and that choked me slightly, so the rage diverted to a high-speed tie-removal throat disco that went on for entirely too long.
At some point I became aware of stillness and stopped my thrashing to discover that every single person around me was staring. One woman was filming me on her iPhone. I felt my head turn purple. I picked up my phone and helmet and walked straight to the nearest bar.
So one week away from the start of Speed Week and it was cancelled again for the second year. The rain had lashed down over the preceding few days, putting 8 inches of water on top of the salt. The Dry Lakes Racers officials had made the huge effort of regularly going out to the lake and checking its condition, only to return with the sad news. Faced with the amount of water and the knowledge that it would not dissipate and dry up in time, they had no choice but to cancel.
I sat at the bar plying myself with whiskey and going over the options.There was no way I was giving up. Sure, as a backup plan we could just go back to Tailem Bend, but it was a desperately close call on whether the bike could get the record there—the track’s only 1.4 k’s long, and we’d have to make considerable changes to the bike then have it re-scrutineered by the officials.
I needed more room, a minimum of 2 kilometres, I needed somewhere that was flat and safe and legal, and I needed it now.
My problem was time, I was on a deadline. The bike was part of the university curriculum, a subject matter for the students to learn from. Its whole conception was based on creating a motorcycle for salt-lake racing from nothing. That was now achieved and the next wave of students would soon be reinventing the bike into a hovercraft or submarine or something. My two-year window was closing fast.
And, of course, many lives had been planned around the dates for Speed Week: everyone had taken time off work, bookings had been made, all the many and varied components built around this five-day period. They’d all be disappointed, too.
First I decided I needed to call Doug Gould. He was supplying the speed data logging equipment and this kit was paramount. So I finished my whiskey, ordered another and picked up the phone. Doug and I talked through the options. His business is tracking speed, so he knows every place with potential; he is also a pilot so he knows more than a few airstrips as well. We spent the afternoon on the phone working our way through all possible sites but, despite how big our continent is, we ended up with a very short list. It turned out that our options were limited because of the timeframe and the length of track we needed.
While I was on the phone to Doug, the DLRA had been busy, too. They had somehow come up with permission to get onto Lake Gairdner between 28 May and 1 June, on a different part of the lake, one that was dry. Getting the permission to do this kind of thing is in a word gargantuan; there are so many people to convince, government departments to lobby, councils to liaise with, environmental regulations to adhere to, it goes on and on. But the DLRA are a determined bunch and had managed to shift the parameters for a second attempt at holding Speed Week. A massive effort by the guys. Not only that, but they’d also gone out to Lake Omeo in the Victorian High Country and secured it as a backup location. Of course, while they were at Lake Omeo organising the second site, 9 inches of rain pelted down; it had not rained like that in ten years, the lake was underwater.
So I was sitting in a bar looking at a very short list, distilled like my whiskey down through many stages. We had checked every possible option, every airport runway, private roads, private council roads, military roads, mud lakes, other salt lakes, anything and everything we thought we could run the bike on. In the end I left Doug to chase down the list and went home; he had the contacts to make the calls and I had to get ready for a work trip to Brisbane in the morning.
My flight the next day cruelly took me over Lake Gairdner. Again I pressed my nose up against the perspex window and peered down at the water, but instead of my usual excitement and anticipation, I felt hopeless. I was really starting to think that I just wasn’t meant to be doing this.
Gregg Cooper was sitting next to me; we do a lot of business together, he’s a perpetual ‘can do’ man. He laughed as I snivelled out the window.
‘Bonneville,’ he said. ‘You need to go stateside.’
He was talking about the mecca of salt-lake racing, Bonneville in Utah, where it all began. Bonneville Speed Week was held annually in September, and attracted the craziest of the crazies. ‘Of course an American’s going to tell me that,’ I replied moodily. ‘But we’re flying over a perfectly good salt lake right fuckin’ now.’
‘Lake being the operative word there, Pauli.’
I gazed down at the water. Yep, my racetrack was a lake. ‘It’s not going to work, mate,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have enough time to get the bike to Bonneville.’
Gregg narrowed his eyes at me in a no-bullshit way. ‘So figure it out, man, make it happen.’
Gregg’s from Texas, he’s like that. When he came to Australia six years ago from Houston to start his own oil and gas supply business, he had very little. No contacts, no leg up the Aussie food chain, but he nailed it. How? Because he walked into a market dominated by old-school back-scratching slack-arse ‘Nah, mate, some other time’ attitudes. He had more drive and motivation than his local competition, and deservedly did well. Right now, though, he was turning that determination on me, and giving me plenty to think about.
We landed in Brisbane, jumped in a cab and headed for the hotel. Gregg had booked a massive self-catering top-floor penthouse bang in the middle of the city. It’s one of the things I like about Gregg and Maximum Dave, who was joining us on this trip. These are men with drive and direction, always that one step ahead of the game in business. MD can see the angle like a pool shark feigning a defeat, then he strikes. I know if I sawed off the top of MD’s head his fiendishly designed brain would glow incandescent and powerful. These two always do things on the top shelf. They just don’t travel unless they can lavish a high level of hedonism into it. Dave is all about turning left when he gets on an aircraft, and Gregg is a gastronomic genius, so even though I’m usually content to travel rough, if I’m on a business trip with these guys I happily raise my bar and put on three kilos in a week.
Take, for example, the dinner arrangements for that evening. An acclaimed restaurant within walking distance from our opulent digs, the house speciality was aged beef, the wine list was world-class, the decanters crystal, a waiter rushed up with a tiny dustpan and broom to remove crumbs from the table as I tore into my bread roll, the toilet was way better appointed than my house, and the maître d’ was so efficient he had to be a cyborg. Meanwhile, the three of us are bouncing the steel ball of business angles, fart jokes and banter like an oilfield pinball machine that got delivered to the wrong hotel.
Suddenly I started sweating, then I got dizzy, really dizzy. I loosened my tie and gulped water.
‘You okay, mate?’ Gregg asks. His brow is furrowed and the look on his face tells me that I’m not okay at all.
I attempted to stand up and vaguely remember telling him to get me back to the room. Which he did, because I woke up on the floor in the penthouse bathroom. And immediately started vomiting, hard.
Gregg put a blanket around me and told me an ambulance was on its way. ‘Holy shit, man, I haven’t seen puking like that since I was in college.’
I couldn’t raise my head and blacked out again.
In the ambulance, vomiting at light speed, it was like the devil himself had his arm down my throat and was squeezing my stomach as hard as he could. I was sweating so much my clothes were soaking wet. The paramedic was yelling at me above the siren while slapping my face, someone was pouring water on my head and another was holding a bag over my mouth. I was scared, really scared. I fought hard to take in what was happening around me but I just couldn’t focus on anything. Then I was out again.
Next time I woke up in a hospital room—again. I had spent more time in hospital in the past year than I had in my entire life, including being born. ‘Kidney stone?’ I asked as the doctor walked in.
He looked puzzled. ‘No, it looks like you have an inner ear infection that caused a violent and acute attack of vertigo.’
To me, vertigo is an Alfred Hitchcock movie or the U2 album, not a face-planting sweaty vomit-filled trip to the hospital. But apparently that’s exactly what vertigo can do. I was very wobbly on my feet for the next two days, with no sense of direction or which way was up and I couldn’t focus; it was a very strange thing to experience and all because I picked up an ear infection, probably from my own children. It’s another joy of parenting: your carrier monkeys bring home enough parasites, bacteria and general nasty infectious shit to start a zombie plague.
Which brings me to Maximum Dave and our flight back to Perth.
The whole cabin was spinning, I was nauseous, the in-flight meal smelt like a decomposing body, and my elementary canal started to go into spasm. Then Dave pulled the earphones from his head, spun his laptop screen at me, pointed to the paused frame of a female zombie with breast implants and joyfully declared she was a ZILF. That was the end of me. I vomited into the in-flight magazine and not the bag that was supposed to be there.
‘Can I eat your lunch then?’ asks Maximum Dave.
‘Choke on it, motherfucker.’ I had four more hours of this to get through.
I’d lost two days, one spent in the hospital, the other in a dark hotel room. When we landed in Perth I turned on my phone as we wandered down the escalator towards the luggage carousel—I nearly had a nervous breakdown as 200-plus emails and messages flooded in.
BECAUSE ANY TRIP
out of Perth to the east coast chews up a day in travel, I had effectively been away for four days. In this time, Doug had managed to get a tentative yes from just one place on our list—the Corowa Airport near Albury-Wodonga on the border of Victoria and New South Wales. Apart from being the only option that suited our timeframe, and the only place that was amenable to our far-fetched plans, Corowa is well laid out with a 2-kilometre main runway and 200 metres of grass runoff in every direction.
In the back of the cab on the way home from the airport as I scanned through the backlog of emails and messages, blatantly disregarding anything that wasn’t bike-related, I got a snapshot of Doug’s amazing feats over the past few days while I’d been wobbling around with vertigo: the Corowa airport management team had agreed; Doug was working on the local council; because the airport was being closed that week for the army to train their parachute display team, we needed to get the official permission from the army as well. It was Thursday, and all this had to happen by Monday, when we would have a one-hour window between eight and nine in the morning to use the main runway. Fuck me, it was going to be tight.
I went straight into planning mode and called the guys at the uni to get the ball rolling on a plan to get there. I sent Colin the map of the airport runway, he came back to me straightaway, saying it would be a close call but the runway should be long enough.
There was so much to do in so little time.
First, we had to have the runway surface checked, get the insurance in place, a risk assessment including medical personnel, fire team, full radio comms monitoring with any aircraft that needed to come in, the speed data logging equipment and of course we still needed the army to give us the nod. That worried me because from my experiences with the defence forces there is a system, the chain of command, and I was sure they had much more important things to be focusing on than our bike run. But the following day the army—bless them—came straight back with a big fat ‘No Worries’ and by lunchtime it was all squared away for Monday, 19 March.