Welcome to two of the craziest events left on the Motorcycling Australia calendar – the Grasstree Beach Races and the Kungurri Hill Climb
As a motorcyclist, how many crazy races have you seen or heard about in the years gone by? You would remember talking to the local club elders about ‘back in the day’ blasts like hill climbs and sand dune races, or other things that could surely never exist again. Fortunately for me, I have been spending a little time in Mackay, Central Queensland where lunacy lives on.
The Beach Races would have to be one of the oldest races in Australia, having started way back in 1927 – yep, that’s almost 90 years of madness. It has moved around a few different areas in the Mackay region, but recently it has found a home at the gorgeous seaside town of Grasstree Beach. So one Sunday every September, well before the wet season (when the sea turtles move in along with crocodiles and jellyfish) and in the middle of the day when the tide is at its lowest, this sleepy little village comes alive in a big way.
The Kungurri Hillclimb isn’t a pup either. It was started back in 1976 by a local trials rider called David Finn, and is the last of its kind in Australia. At first the course was a goat track up a hill, and just making it to the top was an achievement. Now it gets tidied up by a dozer every few years and is literally a rough, bumpy, rocky hillside dirt drag strip.
As spectacular as the events are, they are almost more about what will arrive in the pits than the race itself, especially on the beach where it is all about top speed and how fast you can get there. The smaller classes include semi-normal big-bored 250s with the addition of flat-track pipes and sweet-smelling race fuels, but the true beach legends are found in the open two-stroke and roadbike classes. The open two-stroke class is usually filled with highly modified CR500s and lots of ‘trade secrets’ that we can only speculate on. You’ll hear about big-bored, methanol-breathing, twin-carbed, 100hp-plus CR500s and you will actually see a KTM with a 540cc overbored Yamaha Banshee engine. With my own two eyes I witnessed a turbo on a YZ450F, and it flew! As for the roadbikes, words cannot describe watching an R1 with knobby tyres clock over 200km/h on a beach – just Google it.
The Hill Climb bikes are not quite as radical, but there is no shortage of extended swingarms and other mods to squeeze every last drop of horsepower from the screaming engines. The most spectacular bike ever to hit the hill was a Suzuki RM250 that someone had politely shoehorned a Hyabusa engine into. Apparently it wasn’t that fast, but the noise was amazing and it dug quite a trench all the way up the hill. After years of riders doing the climb on roadbikes, locals have decided that getting to the top is the easy part. The hard part is coming down – virtually impossible on a bike that weighs that much.
So who is your average punter at these events? It’s not quite like the paddock at a MotoGP race, or even an MX National event; it’s more like standing on the beach or in a bush setting with a bunch of crazy back-shed tuners vying for a world championship. Both beards and beer are flowing early in the day, but don’t worry, competitors don’t drink till the racing is over. Well not anymore. I may have been told a few stories about the guys trying to reach the top of the hill, two-up and slightly under the weather, but that was all back in the good old days. The entire community gets right behind these two legendary events with around 5000 people heading down to the beach to watch the horsepower mayhem erupt, and hundreds sitting at the base of the hill watching every thrill and spill from the comfort of their deckchairs.
Local rider Noel O’Neill has been racing the event for over 20 years, mainly on big two-strokes. He started out on a Yamaha IT465 and still rides a CR500, occasionally while wearing a crazy clown mask. Russell Walpole has been to almost every climb since 1983 and remembers hating life trying to get an ’84 Honda XL600 to the top. A few short years later he became king of the beach on a brand-new ’87 CR500. This year he rode on a very nice personally built CR500AF with an extended swingarm and a paddle tyre, and scored a spot on the podium – 32 years on from his first appearance.
Both races have crowned a lot of kings over the years and have created a lot of local legends. Local fast guy Matt Dumigan has not only won both the events several times, but he has also been an A4DE class winner and sat at the pointy end at the Finke Desert race too. Recent winner Wade Moohin has his own dyno in his shed and has a methanol CR500 that would put a lot of roadbikes to shame on the quarter mile. But the real undisputed King of the Beach would have to be Mick Hansen. He has worn the crown an astonishing 15 times on the beach and six times on the hill. He also held the time record for the hill from 1997 to 2013, yet again on modified CR500s. Two-strokes still live on strong in this region.
In recent years the beach races have attracted some better known names, too. Aussie-born AMA flat track stars Mick Kirkness (also a Troy Bayliss Classic winner) and Jace Castles both took on the event in 2013. What Mick lacked in straight-line speed he certainly made up for in the corners, basically wringing the bike’s neck around each apex and almost dragging the bars in the sand. Jace, meanwhile, got the memo about horsepower and decided to strap a turbo onto his injected YZ450F. He finished a close second in the final, and yes, the turbo YZ actually made that cool noise on gear changes, just like a western suburbs Subaru on a Saturday night.
In 2012, a good mate told me about the Beach Race and suggested that I pilot (and fix) his KX500 for a crack at the crown. Well, why not, I thought. His KX500 had been pretty much purpose-built for his previous attempts at the Finke desert race and had been modified from standard. No longer a simple 500cc MX bike, this had been bored out to 540cc with porting and carburettor mods by the ever famous Bruce Woodley in Victoria.
The bike had been parked up for a while as it had had a seizure at a previous beach race. Upon dissection, it was decided it needed to go bigger again to fix the scores in the bore. So after a custom 560cc-sized piston turned up, along with a drum of amazing race fuel, I went testing on this weapon. For those of you not lucky enough to have ridden a big-bore two-stroke dirt machine, it is hard to describe the sensation. They vibrate and shake so much you think they are going to snap in half when you click into gear, and they only know one speed: fast.
Imagine all that and being told to fill it full of gears and see how fast it goes … on a beach. Don’t bother running a speedo as you won’t be able to read the numbers – the vibrations at top speed distort your view. Just chuck a GPS in your backpack and hope for the best. We almost cracked 190km/h, which doesn’t sound that fast, but it got there very very quickly and could do it all day long with no mechanical issues.
Aside from all of the sensations I experienced while testing the missile, there was one more on the day I was not ready for: pain! And not arm pump or race fatigue, but the pain of being roosted by wet sand and crazy two-stroke throttle jockeys on the beach. I soon realised why the local veterans wore old leather jackets in the race – when Matt Dumigan opened up his 540cc Banshee-engined, KTM-framed weapon in front of me, I reckon I screamed so loud they would have heard me in Mackay.
After three heats and a third place in the 750m heat, I ended up fourth in class for the day. Pretty good considering 90 per cent of the competition were on methanol purpose-built machines.
Horsepower was a little more subdued for the Hill Climb, where I decided to pilot my YZ250 two-stroke in the Up to 300cc 2T class. I’ve competed in Enduro racing for many years, so hills are not new to me, but doing them super fast was a rude awakening. There are only two ways you can do a sight lap they said: one is to climb the hill on foot, but the second and more popular version is to not worry about it and hope for the best – wide open, flat out.
There are many tactics to getting a good time, too. The track degrades as the day goes on so the hill has the most traction in your first run and you have to make it count. You also have to make it to the top!
My first run was okay, but the traction was almost too much, even with me hanging over the bars. The second run was my fastest, making it to the top cleanly, and the third was terrible as the 150-plus field had minced up the hill leaving rocky patches exposed everywhere. Overall, I managed to get a podium with a third place, 1.2 seconds off the leading pair of guys on 300 two-strokes.
This year was dominated by the local boys that have been watching and racing in the event since they were kids. The Jenner family don’t only live down the road, their mum runs the committee that organises the event, runs the canteen on the day and watches her four sons smash the hill. Their dad Lee cruises around the pits on his 1960s Velocette, just to be a part of the action. This year, eldest son Ryan – whose first podium was in 1988 on a PW50 – won the Up to 300 2T class on his KX295 and the 350 4T class on a borrowed KTM350. Brother Trent rode his crazy coloured and politely named (Kungurri Crackhead) CR500 to a class win in the Open two-strokes, and previous King of the Hill winner Josh Jenner ruled again on his pepped-up KTM525. Just quietly, they now all have massive targets on their backs with the locals trying to come up with new ways of beating those “bloody Jenner boys” in 2016.
Should they go bigger? Should they use methanol? Should they try an extended swingarm in a roadbike with a NOS bottle attached? Who knows, all I can say is that these events are amazing and super challenging at the same time. Keep an eye out for this year’s dates and just tell the family that you are going for a holiday in the Whitsundays … with your bike.
The beach
“How much horsepower did you bring to the party?” That’s the usual question. Take 1 flat beach, put a barrel at the start line, another at the finish and go! There are three heats over 250m, 500m and 750m, with four laps of each. After that you might be lucky enough to make the 800m final which is a collection of all the top bikes from every class.
It’s not just about building a fast bike, but also picking your class wisely. The 450 4T class has several heats and the 500 2T class just plain hurts when you are getting peppered by the roost of 100hp-plus methanol dragons. You can convert your beloved roadbike into a beach monster or just ride what you’ve got and hope for the best. And they start them young here – there are junior classes from 50cc so that the local Mackay area always has an heir to the throne in waiting.
The Hill
The climb is still about horsepower, but as the track isn’t groomed or cleaned up by the tide every night it can become quite the challenge after a big wet season. Competitors blast up the hill one at a time, trying not only to make it to the top, but also to do it a fast as humanly possible to be deemed the King of the Hill.
You get three or four runs, but no sighting lap, just a wave of a flag. Hold it wide open and point the bike upwards.
STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BEN MCCOSH