Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, has often put that country on the world motorcycle map. One such story concerns the ‘Dukes of Wellington’ along with rider Robert Holden, who gained world prominence in a career that spanned the 1980s and early 1990s.
Holden’s racing career started with the Wellington Motorcycle Centre. One of New Zealand’s most successful dealerships, it was a powerhouse that used production racing as a tool to leverage massive sales. In the 1970s the Hiscock brothers, Dave and Neville, had launched their international careers through this energetic business. In the 1980s Robert Holden became the next Wellington generation to start a career with this dealership that had direct links with overseas factories and race teams.
Holden’s international career has been well documented. What hasn’t been widely reported was his enduring relationship with racer-tuner Dallas Rankine and his small team of Wellington-based innovators. Working far outside the conventions of mainstream production racing, this little band of brothers would achieve some amazing results, both in New Zealand and internationally.
The Rankine-Holden partnership culminated in a project that used those local free-thinking elements of technology and artistic design that Wellington seemed to specialise in, along with the business skills to finance it all. Begun in the early 1980s, this crazy adventure ended in a home-brewed Ducati special being raced at Daytona and in Europe in the early 1990s.
Rankine’s hopeless addiction to Ducatis started as an engineering student who scrabbled together the money to buy a Ducati 750 GT: Others would follow. He started club racing on the Ducati, eventually ending up riding in the 1978 Castrol Six-Hour at Manfield. A year later Rankine took over British Motorcycles and Spares in Wellington. Brit bikes were on the way out but Rankine could
