Jim Budd Motorcycle Racer

Oran Park, August 1978 (article source – REVS magazine, February 3 – 16, 1993)

I had a terrific scrap with Jim Budd at Oran Park in August 1978.  We were both on Kawasaki superbikes, though they were very different in pedigree.  Mike was sourced from Japanese Yoshimura parts courtesy of Ross Hannan, while Jim was riding Barry Taylor’s American-sourced Phase Four machine.

By then superbike racing had become quite popular, due in no small part to the flamboyant riding side of Croz.  Spectators were thrilled to see him win feature races or get high placings against pukka racing bikes on a raunchy ZIR superbike that differed little in external appearance from the road version.  But he was absent that day – racing overseas if I recall right.

Barry Taylor’s Phase 4 Kawasaki ridden by Jim Budd was a beautiful bike, using technology from US drag racing.  Barry Taylor and Croz’s sponsor Hannan were big blokes with big personalities who generated a lot of interest in this then new branch of the sport.

Prior to the meeting I’d obtained a Gerex Multi-Fire ignition system, developed in the US with technology from NASA.  It fired the plug 50 times in a millisecond – in testing it sparked like a flash bulb.  This gave us the extra horsepower we felt would give us the edge on Jim, but unknown to us, Barry had converted to alcohol fuel (allowable then), which made our practice times about even.  Contrast and radical developments like these characterised the early days of superbikes – if you sat on your hands for one meeting you were left behind.

The race was on the then recently extended Grand Prix track – there’d only been a couple of races on the full track with the new figure of eight section.  It was a little different to today – narrower in the S bend section leading to the hairpin and also narrower and more difficult in the left-hand kink at the end of the straight.

At the drop of the flag, Jim used the alcohol-fuelled motor to blast into an early lead, followed by a whole gaggle of us sorting out positions early on.  Then I latched onto Jim’s tail and we pulled away from the field.  Jim was getting a slight edge out of corners, and pulling three or four lengths on me down the straight.  But I was able to get past him in the tighter parts of the circuit.

Roger Heyes held the lap record for the full circuit at the time, and we were all keen to break it – any record of Roger’s was not a soft one.  Unbeknown to us we were breaking it repeatedly and at the end of the day we’d taken four seconds off Roger’s time, with my best time just a whisker in front of Jim’s.

I was proud of that – it’s not too often you do that – generally lap records go by a tenth or two.  Being a long track, and both having the extra horsepower contributed.  But we were going very quick – I remember following Jim into the bend formerly called Robin Orlando and seeing him standing on the pegs controlling a slide and I thought “Struth, he’s going for it”, but then I found myself doing the same thing, we were going that hard.

Effective stick tyres for the 200kg+ superbikes of the time were not around then.  The semi-grooved slicks we ran on the rear overheated after three laps and would start spinning badly.  I had the latest three-and-a-half-inch rim at the rear, considered wide at the time.  Today’s GP riders drive out of turns spinning in a relatively controlled fashion – ours were like a light switch – halfway round the turn our back-ends would light up and leave black marks on the track.

I don’t think that kind of superbike riding had been seen much until then, apart from Croz.

Funnily, Graham Keyes won the race with Roger Heyes second.  Neither Jim nor I finished.  Going hammer and tongs all that way, working the engine so hard down the straight to stay with Jim, blew my crankshaft at three-quarter distance, and Jim’s twistgrip-stretching upped his fuel consumption – he ran dry on the last lap.  A lapped competitor towed Jim in and he still crossed the line first.  Such was the break we’d made on the field, but he was disqualified for receiving outside help.

Although I didn’t finish, it was still one of my most exciting races.  I couldn’t have tried harder.  Before the race I was really pumped, to the point of feeling sick in the gut.  With the absence of Croz, second place was no longer the best I could hope for.  I felt I had some chance of winning, of beating Jim, and that’s why the race has really stuck in my memory.