When your motorcycle racing resume is as long and storied as Allan Cunynghame’s, it’s little surprise that people routinely come out of the woodwork to ask the exact same question: “Hey Allan, whatever happened to that bike you raced back in such-and-such-an-event? Have you still got it? And do you want to sell it?”
If you’ve been a champion enduro, rally and road racer, and your professional career took you all around the world to race some rather exotic bikes in some equally exotic locations, it’s little wonder people want to know if they’re a chance of hunting down a piece of two-wheeled history.
In the specialist arena of legendary Australian Safari race bikes, there’s a quietly spoken, lanky bloke from Geelong, Victoria, who goes by the nickname of Beak, and he might just rank as the country’s foremost Safari bike ‘picker’. His man cave is jammed with treasures from the glory days of the groundbreaking Wynn’s Safari that roared into life in 1985 and was renamed the Australian Safari in 1989.
Beak himself raced the debut Wynn’s Safari from Sydney to Darwin in ’85 aboard a Yamaha XT600Z Ténéré, and while he’s a fan of all types and brands of motorcycles, he’s definitely got an attachment to the tuning fork brand’s legendary desert sleds. He’s already built amazing replicas of Yamaha’s XT500 and XT600Z Ténéré Paris-Dakar Rally race bikes, so when he put his mind to
