As someone who has always been equally happy on two or four wheels, I’ve often wondered why more motorcycle racers don’t make a move to cars – and vice-versa.
Some do, obviously, with the list topped by the late John Surtees, the only person to win the world’s premium titles (500cc class in motorcycles/F1 in cars) across both disciplines.
Fellow Brit Mike ‘The Bike’ Hailwood also proved just as adept on four as he was on two wheels, though the closest he got to emulating Surtees on four wheels was a second place finish in our own Tasman Series (driving a Surtees TS8 F5000) in 1972 and winning the European F2 championship title later the same year.
Venezuelan Johnny Cecotto is another high-profile motorcycle racer (he was a 2-time world champion) who made a successful transition to cars, initially in Formula 2 and F1, then Touring Cars.
Current MotoGP stalwart, Valentino Rossi has also dabbled with four wheels, twice doing F1 tests with Ferrari and even turning up here in NZ one year (really!) to do Rally New Zealand.
Here, of course Graeme Crosby, is our own poster boy for making it on both two and four wheels, the Auckland all-rounder still the only motorcycle racer to have won the Daytona 200, Imola 200, the Suzuka Eight Hour and an Isle of Man TT, let alone made a successful move to Touring Cars here and across the Tasman.
Other riders-turned half-decent race car drivers here have included – let’s see I should know most off by heart but you’re going to have to excuse me if I miss the odd one out – road racer-turned car dealer and tin-top racer Rob Lewis from Christchurch, MX-turned touring car ace John Penny from Taupo, MX-turned Targa stalwart Jason Gill, talented road racer-turned Targa runner Tony Rees, former MX-turned Touring Car (and powerboat!) racer Greg Brinck, and works Honda Superbike stalwart Aaron Slight who raced a Honda Accord SuperTourer in the BTCC before returning home and has since contested various Targa – and circuit – events here.
Way – and here I really am talking last century stuff – back when, of course, the move from bikes to cars was a more natural one. Mainly in that case because virtually everyone needing personal transport transitioned from push bike to motorbike to car… as both George Begg and Paul Fahey mention – very much in passing – in their memoires.
Fast forward a generation however and, because of the increasing specialisation of each discipline – moving from two to four wheels, let alone expecting to enjoy the same level of success in both – was far from a foregone conclusion.
With no motorcycle-riders in my immediate family as I was growing up, I could quite easily have missed out on my own particular two-wheel journey had it not been for the movie On Any Sunday.
Because it just happened to coincide with both an 8-month move to a cottage in the country while the new MacKay family home was being built in Gore, and the boom in sales of small, user-friendly Japanese trail bikes being bought by farmers for cheap efficient transport around their properties, before you could say SL125, TS185 or DT250, I was down the road riding my (sadly, now late) friend Donald Johnston’s little fat-tyred Suzuki RV125 farm bike every opportunity I got.
Within 18 months I had bought the first of two XL175 Hondas on which I learned the basics or riding – and racing. And the rest is – well – rather ancient – history these days, isn’t it?
I raise my own ‘conversion’ to illustrate just how great a part what l suppose you could call ‘happenstance,’ being in the ‘right-place-at-the-right-time’ or just plain old ‘luck’ can play in who we are, and what we end up both doing with our lives and achieving with them until our allotted time is up.
I do so to introduce arguably New Zealand’s greatest two-to-four-wheel competition convert, the late – and unquestionably great – Dr Rodger Vincent Freeth.
Sadly, ‘Dr Rog’ died – at the age of just 39 – as the result of internal injuries sustained in an accident while co-driving for fellow Kiwi works Subaru driver Peter ‘Possum’ Bourne on the first day of the World Championship Rally Australia on 18 September 1993. See tribute video on YouTube below…..
Though still best known for his exploits on the large capacity motorcycles on which he had first made a name for himself while studying for a physics degree at Auckland University, Freeth had actually embarked on a two-pronged journey when he decided it was time to investigate life beyond two wheels.
I say it was ‘time to investigate’ life beyond two wheels because that was the way Rodger operated. Something I found out when I interviewed him for a piece of I was planning to write (and which I remember starting but don’t think I ever completed) for an Aussie bike mag in the early 1990s.
By that point Rodger was as well-known on the other side of the Tasman as he was at home, thanks to his two wins and a second place record in the big annual Arai 500 endurance races held at Bathurst over the Easter weekend between the years 1982 and 1985.
By this time, he and local bike builder Ken McIntosh had established a successful relationship based as much on mutual respect and shared goals than anything else.
Early on in his career, Rodger started out on production bikes, initially road-going ones like Kawasaki’s wickedly quick but wayward Mach 111 500 2-stroke, then on production race bikes like a Suzuki TR500, Yamaha TZ750 and Suzuki RG500.
With his long, lanky 2m frame Freeth was never the most natural-looking rider ever to ‘chuck a leg over a motorcycle.’ Not that he ever let that get in the way of the almost child-like enjoyment he used to derive from riding a motorcycle as quickly as he could make it go.
Some might (still) say that all that amazing brain power was wasted on a ‘bloody motorbike.’ I – and I am fairly sure thousands of other ‘bike guys ‘n gals’ around the world – would beg to differ, however.
I remember sitting in the lounge of his small rented flat in Auckland’s Epsom, absolutely enthralled, as Dr Rog gave me a potted history of his ‘bike career,’ which started like so many others at the time, with the need to get to a from his home – which was then in Papakura on Auckland’s southern rural fringe to university in Auckland’s Symonds St.
The freeing up of the hire purchase laws plus advent of cheap, reliable motorcycles out of Japan fuelled something of a boom in bike sales at the time so Rodger did his research, singled out a suitable bike and bought it…not letting the fact that though he had had extensive experience ride bicycles (Including an impromptu holiday trek round the South Island one school holidays) he had zero experience with anything with a motor!
Instead he had the bike delivered to his home and once it was there did what any other self-respecting academic would have done – he got out the owner’s manual, opened it at Page 1 and literally didn’t put it down until he knew where everything was, what everything did and – no doubt in the best possible mix of Japanese and English documents like handbooks were (in)famous for at the time – how to start, ride and stop like a boss!
I didn’t ask how his first trip to and from Uni went, but pretty soon Rodger had joined the Uni motorcycle club and was contemplating his first race.
Of course, with a mind like his Rodger was never going to be satisfied with leaving any one of his race bikes – or later his Toyota Starlet V8 – stock standard, and so it was with his TZ750 Yamaha for which he developed what at the time were a fairly revolutionary set of downforce producing racing car-style aerodynamic wings.
Never mind that MotoGP bikes have only now – over 50 years later – started to sprout similar appendages (albeit mainly at the front, mind) the Auto Cycle Union (ACU) the predecessor to the current governing body in New Zealand, Motorcycling NZ, bowed to pressure from other less adventurous competitors and banned them forthwith.
Undeterred Rodger simply sought out other ways to go faster – selling the big TZ and racing RG500 Suzukis provided by importer Rod Coleman, before teaming up with Ken McIntosh when the class rules here started favouring large capacity 4-stroke engines over 500cc GP-spec 2-strokes.
His first foray into the then foreign world of four wheels was as a co-driver for local rally drivers, something he did in his downtime(!!!) when not working towards his doctorate in astrophysics at Auckland Uni during term time and contesting the annual NZF1 motorcycle championship series over the traditional summer vacation period.
As it turned out he was forced to call time on his two wheel career after severing tendons in his left hand while trying to man-handle top Kiwi rally driver Neil Allport’s car back on the road while the pair were contesting a rally in the United States
The injury required microsurgery and took a year to sort out – more than enough time as it turned out to allow the good doctor to plot his next competition purchase – Trevor Crowe’s Open Saloon Car Association (OSCA) title-winning Toyota Starlet V8.
This was the second of the two Starlets Crowe ran and when Freeth bought it, it was still running an overbored (to 4.3 litre) version of the classic Oldsmobile light alloy-block 3.5 litre engine from the same family as the one fitted to Rover’s 3500 SD1 and Range Rover siblings.
Because the complete car tipped the scales at well under 800kg the smaller, lighter engine was no real handicap. However, in the search for an even better power-to-weight ratio Rodger acquired a genuine ‘Rover’ V8 from Tom Walkinshaw Racing in the UK.
In anyone else’s hands the purchase of such a finickity, highly-strung car could well have been disastrous. But Rodger was more than up for the challenge, one of his innovations a ‘real-time data acquisition system’ (aka a video camera).
I can still remember his explaining the rationale behind the camera to me in our interview…. the idea that while he was busy driving the car, the camera was keeping an eye on the gauges, collating data on the revs he was using, the oil pressure, water temp etc etc , which he could run back and watch after each race and/or race meeting.
This is the kind of thing even Cadet class karters use and very much take for granted these days. Yet Rodger was first with the idea coming up to 40 years ago.
Needless to say that in his capable hands the Starlet enjoyed a second lease on life in the North Island – Rodger winning the NZ Sport Sedan championship title in1988 and remaining one of the title contenders in the car until selling it back to South Islander John Harcourt and buying the spaceframe -based Nissan 300ZX IMSA car which had finally rendered it and all the other full-bodied Mazda RX7s, Ford Capris, etc etc it used to run against, uncompetitive at a national level.
By this stage Rodger’s rally co-driving career had taken off and last time I spoke to him (which must have been at some sort of Subaru rally team function in June or July 1993) he admitted that being paid to travel the world with good mate Possum did in fact go some way to making up for his recent – and definitely reluctant on his part – parting of the ways with Auckland University (where he had been lecturing since completing his doctorate.
I also seem to recall we talking about how hard it had been keeping the Lola Ford IndyCar in a straight line when he set a new NZ Land Speed Record of 313.25km/h on a rough and bumpy Canal Rd West on the Hauraki Plains in February that year.
Sadly, that was the last conversation I had with Rodger because on September 18 that year his luck ran out….
Everyone I knew who knew Dr Rodger Vincent Freeth was absolutely devastated by his sudden, not to mention very public, death.
What I remember most about the time and the aftermath however was his funeral – which had to be held in the Auckland Town Hall because of the number of people who wanted to attend – was the positive way everyone responded.
Some funerals feel like wakes, this one, however, felt like the true celebration of a unique life (very) well lived.
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