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Photo - Mike Smith:
Photo and story - courtesy Andy McGechan:
Email Andy: He may have a photo of you in his extensive files?
It may have been a few years since Mike Smith had been on a motorcycle, but that didn’t stop him grabbing a Yamaha R1 and running with the leaders in both regional and national road-racing events in New Zealand.
In his debut New Zealand road race season last year, Smith finished a strong ninth in the highly-charged Superbike class, not a bad comeback for a 41-year-old who had been out of the sport since he was a teenager.
He learned his race-craft as an 18-year-old in England, riding a Yamaha RD400, and polished his skills when he enrolled in the popular Chas Mortimer race school, but didn’t take the sport much further at that time. “It was just too much for me from a logistics viewpoint,” said Smith. “I lived in Plymouth, in south-west England and it was a long ay to the nearest race circuit … that was a Goodwood, near London, an old World War Two airfield. “Living in Plymouth, I took to sailing instead and became quite a good yachtie.”
In 1989 he settled in New Zealand and got married, but it wasn’t until last year that Smith finally found he had time to return to his first love, motorcycle racing.
He tasted immediate success.
Smith finished ninth in the national championships and runner-up in the Auckland F1 series, even though he missed a couple of races with mechanical problems
He then won the North Island Cup for 2004 and, just last weekend, wrapped up the Superbike title win at the final round of the Victoria Motorcycle Club’s six-round series.
“Over the next two months, I plan to get the bike ready for the nationals and look for some extra sponsorship over what I have to date."
“It will possibly be the most exciting championship in years,” said Smith. “Yamaha has a really good R1 and all the other bike manufacturers are getting heavily involved. I can’t wait."
“The thing with New Zealand is that there are so many great places to ride and the racetracks are good too. I call Pukekohe my home track but I enjoy racing at Taupo too and that’s undergoing a huge expansion at the moment."
“In addition, there is word that Meremere (a drag strip facility halfway between Auckland and Hamilton) has received approval for it to go ahead with the building of a new road-race track. The sport is really going ahead here.”
