BIG WINNER!
On October 22, 1978, Yamaha finally won a major International road race with a four-stroke motorcycle for the very first time.
Jim and Roger Heyes teamed up to win Australia’s Castrol Six Hour endurance race on theTeam AvonTyresYamaha XS1100, the Japanese company’s first four-cylinder street-bike. Together with the Isle of Man’s Production TT, this race – first organised in 1970 at their local Amaroo Park circuit by the Willoughby District Motorcycle Club, Sydney – was widely recognised then as the world’s most important race for ‘street-legal’ motorcycles.
The tight, twisty 1.94km/1.21-mile Amaroo track was a down under version of the Brands Hatch short circuit, similarly complete with elevation changes and right-hand turns. Crammed with anything up to 20,000 spectators, and with a full grid of 40 bikes jostling for position throughout the 360-plus laps covered, each of them less than a minute in length, this was by far the biggest and most prestigious bike race in Australia for its 18 years of existence up until 1987 – with the last three run at the nearby Oran Park circuit – before Phillip Island’s debut Australian 500GP in 1989.
Complete with crucial pit-stops for refuelling (stock fuel tanks only) and (from 1978) tyre changes – each year the Six Hour was screened live on network TV in its entirety, until Castrol stopped supporting it after the 1987 race. In its late 1970s heyday the Castrol Six Hour was certainly the most prestigious, most publicised, best-funded and most commercially important Production race in the global calendar: it mattered…
That’s why it enjoyed huge support from the global motorcycle industry right up to factory level, as well as from their customers down under, who saw it as a real test of the bikes – and tyres they might wish to buy. A key component of the race was that the motorcycles had to be completely stock, exactly as available the day after the race, in dealers’ showrooms in Australia, and they were rigorously inspected in both pre-race and post-race scrutineering to ensure that they were – though not always with complete success.
Hence, for the 1978 running the Willoughby Club acquired a machine to check the tension and pressure rate of valve and clutch springs,
