Matt Phillips conquered the enduro world before walking away in his early 20s. A decade later, the quietly spoken Tasmanian reflects on the extraordinary career he left behind – and what brought him back to bikes
You could make a reasonable case that Matt Phillips is the most successful Australian motorcycle racer most people have never heard of. Before turning 24, the Tasmanian had won four world championship crowns and helped Australia to its first ISDE World Trophy victory. These days, Phillips spends half his life underground, working seven days on, seven days off at a mine in Rosebery on Tasmania’s wild west coast. Now 33, he is completing dual electrical and instrumentation apprenticeships, the latter involving the calibration of metering equipment measuring flow, density and pressure.
It’s an unusually ordinary occupation for someone who, a decade ago, was the best enduro rider on the planet. In 2016, Phillips won both the E2 title and the outright EnduroGP world championship. It was the high point of a remarkable few years in Europe that had already delivered Junior and E3 world championships and would make the kid from Wynyard, on Tasmania’s north-west coast, one of Australia’s most successful off-road riders.
Then, aged just 23, he walked away from it.
Today Phillips is back in Wynyard with his wife Catherine and their two kids, four-year-old Seth and two-year-old Eden. There are still motorcycles in the shed and he never completely gave up riding, but world-championship racing now belongs firmly to another part of his life.
Ask him whether he has any regrets about leaving it behind and the answer arrives without hesitation.
“No, not at all,” he says. “But I certainly miss a lot of the friends we made and I miss being at the racing a lot. That was one thing. It was like a hangover, really, when you stop that sort of thing.
“It was quite tough to give it up. I don’t necessarily follow any racing or anything like that, but I love to be there in the moment when I’m there, and really enjoy the day, seeing everyone else’s efforts and emotion and all that sort of stuff.”
Phillips did some coaching and continued riding, including competition at home, but the world championship treadmill was gone. He was back home, working in one of Australia’s longest-running mining operations, and he and Catherine were thinking about starting a family – about as far removed from the EnduroGP paddock as you could imagine.
To understand the meteoric rise to success this quietly spoken bloke experienced, you need to go back to 2011, when an 18-year-old motocross convert from Tasmania appeared at the ISDE in Finland and promptly announced himself to the rest of the enduro world. Phillips had only switched seriously from motocross to enduro that year. His first Australian Off-Road Championship season could hardly have gone better. He won four rounds outright and finished third outright behind vastly more experienced Ballard’s Yamaha teammates Chris Hollis and Stefan Merriman, also finishing runner-up in E3.
Phillips arrived at his first ISDE having contested only 10 enduros. By the end of the opening day, he had finished second in E2 and had people in the international paddock wondering where this unknown Tasmanian had come from.
One of the people alongside him in Australia needed no convincing. Merriman had already done what Phillips was beginning to contemplate. The New Zealand-born Australian had built a hugely successful career in Europe and knew exactly how far a talented rider could go if he was prepared to leave home to find out.
“He basically told me not to waste my time in Australia,” Phillips recalls. “He encouraged me to go on and try and do the world championship stuff if it would work out. He told me a couple of stories of his time away and got me excited about it, opened my eyes to the idea.”
By the end of 2012 there was little left for Phillips to prove domestically. He had added the Australian E2 championship and E2 Australian Four-Day Enduro title, finishing third outright in the national championship behind Toby Price and Daniel Milner.
He had the speed and the desire to race overses, but no network in Europe and little idea how to turn either into a world championship ride. Patrick Lowry, then general manager of Australian Husqvarna importer the Paul Feeney Group, and company principal Paul Feeney helped bridge that gap, using their Husqvarna connections to put the pieces together for a 2013 campaign with the factory-supported CH Racing squad.
“They set it all up,” Phillips says. “I was keen to go forward and do the Europe thing but I didn’t have any contacts. They facilitated the whole thing and made it happen. What a great opportunity that transpired to be.”
Phillips had grown up racing with his parents alongside him. Europe would be different. Aged 19, he left Tasmania and travelled to the other side of the world alone.
“It was always my decision, but I knew that if I was going to do that, I’d have to do it by myself,” he says. “That was a bit of a shock to the system because I always had Mum and Dad there helping me with racing and all the things leading up to that. I was still a kid.
“I just travelled by myself, went over there and raced and lived by myself. That was the first time moving away from home and doing all that sort of stuff, so I grew up pretty quick.”
Riding a Husqvarna with the CH Racing team, he won the 2013 Junior World Championship in his first attempt. A year later he stepped straight into the senior ranks, switched to KTM’s factory-backed Farioli team and did something no rider had managed before. He followed a Junior world championship immediately with a senior title, winning the 2014 E3 crown. He was 21.
By then, Europe was beginning to feel a little less solitary. Catherine, his girlfriend from school back in Tasmania, joined him after that first season and the pair travelled together as the championship moved from country to country.
His second season with KTM in 2015 didn’t produce another world title, but Phillips finished runner-up in E3 before joining an Australian team that delivered one of the country’s great international enduro results.
At the ISDE in Slovakia, Phillips joined Milner, Josh Green, Beau Ralston and Daniel Sanders in the five-man Australian World Trophy team; they won for the first time, completing a remarkable ISDE in which the Australian Junior and Women’s teams also won their respective categories.
He left KTM at the end of 2015 and returned to the CH Racing operation with which he’d won his first world championship, this time to race Sherco machinery.
The move raised eyebrows. Phillips was stepping away from one of the most powerful organisations in off-road racing to race a motorcycle that, on paper at least, didn’t look like the obvious machine for what he wanted to achieve.
Phillips initially signed to race Sherco’s
450SEF-R in E2, but ultimately campaigned the smaller 300SEF-R. Against machines up to 450cc, there were plenty who wondered whether he’d made life unnecessarily difficult for himself.
Phillips finished third outright on the opening day of the 2016 season in Morocco, then won E2 and the EnduroGP classification outright the following day. A week later, in atrocious conditions in Portugal, he did it again. The wins kept coming and, by the middle of the season, the Tasmanian had established healthy leads in both E2 and the new EnduroGP classification.
That second championship was significant. Until 2016, the Enduro World Championship had primarily been decided within its individual capacity classes. EnduroGP introduced an additional outright classification, pitting every rider and every class against one another to determine the fastest rider in the championship.
Despite being an outspoken critic of the concept, he arrived at the final GP in Cahors, France, with enough points in hand that he didn’t need heroics. He kept himself out of trouble, secured the E2 championship, and at 23 became the inaugural EnduroGP world champion, delivering Sherco its first Enduro World Championship at the same time. By the end of 2016, Phillips had accumulated four world championship crowns.
Ask him now what stands out from those years and the first thing he mentions isn’t a championship, a GP victory or standing on an end-of-year FIM Gala stage alongside some of the biggest names in motorcycle sport.
“I guess just initially going over and backing myself,” he says. “That was the pivotal moment in it all. And I made some great relationships and friends along the way. That’s the important stuff. Obviously the results are great too.”
Then he says something that tells me everything I need to know about why a rider of Phillips’ talent who had the time and the means to win another four world titles would rather swap an international racing career for one of the most remote and rugged places on earth: home. “But the results don’t mean a lot… they do – but they don’t at the same time, you know? Everything came quite easy, even though looking back, it wasn’t easy. I did a lot of work, but I achieved the goals I wanted to go there for, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, what’s next?’”
By July 2017, still only 23, he announced he would leave the world championship at the end of the season. At the time he spoke publicly about missing the Australian lifestyle, losing focus and becoming disillusioned with aspects of the championship itself. He nevertheless completed the season, finishing fourth overall after a pair of fourth places at the final GP in Germany. He packed his title-winning trophies in his suitcase and left it all behind.
A decade on there’s a connection to the current world championship that has helped keep Phillips on a bike. Fellow Tasmanian Kyron Bacon is now making his own way in international enduro and the pair ride together when Bacon is home.
“I really love that and it’s probably the reason why I’ve kept riding,” Phillips says. “I follow his racing and keep interested in what he’s up to.”
Phillips also retained relationships from his own racing days, including one that would eventually bring his career almost full circle.
Lowry had since established his own distribution company, Lowry Australia, which took over Australian distribution of Beta in 2018. More than a decade after Lowry helped get the teenage Phillips to Europe with Husqvarna, Phillips picked up the phone.
“I reached out about doing something with Patrick and the guys at Beta,” he says. “They were super kind and now we’ve got this little bit of a thing happening.”
A ‘little bit of a thing’ is one way of describing a four-time world champion becoming a Beta ambassador. Beta announced the partnership in May, describing it as Phillips’ return to riding and racing on home soil and the 33-year-old now has a MY26 RR 300 Race two-stroke in the shed.
“They just trusted me with their product, which is cool,” he says. “There were no set conditions or anything like that. Just ride the bike.”
Phillips had tested with Beta during his world championship career and came close to signing with the Italian manufacturer before ultimately joining Sherco. More importantly, the current 300 appealed to Phillips because its carburettor and mechanical power valve made it familiar to someone whose preferences were shaped by the race bikes of a decade ago.
“The reason I reached out is because I knew they’d be somewhat similar to the best of what I had then,” he says.
After riding it, his assessment is characteristically brief. “Yeah, it’s very good. Super strong.”
And, increasingly, there are other people to share it with. Seth and Eden are growing up around bikes much as their father did. Four-year-old Seth hasn’t quite caught the bug yet, but two-year-old Eden is already showing promise.
“She loves the bikes. Eden loves coming out in the shed and checking out the bikes and going for a ride around the paddock at home. She might be a bit of a rider. We’ll see.”
Grandpa, it seems, is prepared: “Grandpa’s got all the bikes lined up there for them, ready to go. All brand-new bikes there ready for them.” And Catherine? “As long as the kids are happy and healthy, she’s happy,” Phillips says.
Phillips had hoped to contest the Australian Four-Day Enduro if the event went ahead and has his eye on a Transmoto eight-hour event. But there’s no training program aimed at resurrecting a career, it’s just about finding the spark again that was extinguished all those years ago – no accumulating points, no contracts to arrange, no unfamiliar European base to call home.
Phillips was still young enough to have an entire racing career ahead of him, but already had the achievements most riders spend that career trying to accumulate. It’ll be interesting to see if, where and when Phillips turns up on a starting grid aboard his Beta 300. Wherever it is, this time it’ll be for all the right reasons.
“I’m not old enough to be in the vets class yet,” he laughs. “So just acting like a vet.”
Long way from home
Life at the top occasionally put Phillips in rarefied company. At the end-of-season FIM galas, he rubbed shoulders with world champions including MotoGP’s Marc Marquez and world Trials legend Toni Bou – although anyone imagining wild nights among motorcycle racing royalty might be disappointed.
“They weren’t wild nights,” Phillips laughs. “You’d meet everybody, then have a couple of beers with the different category winners from enduro and their partners.
“Everyone was really nice, down to earth and casual. There were no wannabes there. They were all champions. There was no one trying to be anything.”
But Phillips sees one significant difference between his experience and the longevity of some European riders such as Bou, or hard enduro veteran Graham Jarvis: home was never far away for them.
“It’s in their backyard. I think that’s the key,” he says. “You couldn’t go home on the weekend and de-stress and relax, or hide at home for a week or two and come back all motivated again. Those guys can do that. They can have a good career and have a normal life separate to that as well. I think it’s pretty important.”
