HEAVY DUTY
A LITTLE over four decades ago on October 22, 1978, Yamaha finally won a major international road race with a four-stroke motorcycle for the very first time, when Jim Budd and Roger Heyes teamed to win Australia’s Castrol Six Hour endurance race on the Team Avon Tyres Yamaha XS1100, the Japanese company’s first four-cylinder streetbike.
“THE CASTROL SIX HOUR WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCTION RACE IN THE WORLD”
The Six Hour was the most popular bike race in Australia and the most prestigious, most highly publicised, best funded and most commercially important production race in the world. Until the mid-1980s, it was held at Amaroo Park, a tight twisty 1.94km circuit north-west of Sydney, attracting full grids and anything up to 20,000 spectators, and was screened live on network TV in its entirety.
As such, the Six Hour enjoyed huge support from the global motorcycle industry right up to factory level, as well as from their customers Down Under. For a key component of the race from the very start was that the
