MUD DIDN’T COME DOWN IN THE LAST SHOWER

Biblically wet weather. Mudbath AORC races. Cancelled rounds. Shortened championships. As we bounce from one crisis to the next these days, it can be difficult to recall what happened a few years ago, let alone a decade back.

Okay, pandemic-induced interruptions to race series may be a new thing, but nasty weather wreaking havoc with AORC racing? That sure rings a bell or three – from the 2020 and 2021 seasons, and especially from back in 2011, when Chris Hollis wrapped up the AORC’s Outright title after one of the wettest races the wise old hard men of Australia’s off-road race scene can ever remember.

Significantly, that 2011 season was the last time that Yamaha won the AORC’s premier Pro E2 Class; a long-standing stat that Josh Green is intent on changing this year.

Here’s the Editorial that appeared in November 2011 (Issue #14) of Transmoto Dirt Bike Magazine – a behind-the-scenes insight into Hollis’s win – plus the 2011 AORC series wrap Pictorial article that ran in the following month’s mag, featuring imagery of the appalling conditions from that memorable series-deciding mudbath at Dungog…

NOTE: As a matter of interest, Rounds 3 and 4 of the 2022 NSW Off-Road Championship takes place at this same venue in late May.

It’s pissing down! And I’m not talking a passing shower. It’s been raining for 24 hours flat-out and showing no signs of backing off. It’s as if God has put a backhoe through the ‘upstairs’ water main. Word spreads around the pits that Sydney has just been smacked with another 50mm of rain, which is heading north, and that a menacing low-pressure system is bearing down on Newcastle. Some 50km inland in the Upper Hunter Valley, where the final weekend’s racing of the 2011 AORC season is taking place, things are looking increasingly grim. The mountains surrounding the picturesque pit paddock are shrouded in low-lying mist, which occasionally gives way to reveal a ferocious bank of evil black cloud above it.

Despite the best efforts of Trent Lean and the crew from the Dungog Motorcycle Club, the torrential rain looks like it’ll bring their months of AORC track prep unstuck … for a second time since June! Creeks have turned into whitewater rivers, and paddocks into playgrounds for ducks. The Pro and Expert classes’ cross-country race is shortened to two hours and, despite the most brutal hills being cut out, some of the country’s best off-road riders struggle to even make it around the parade lap.

The picnic-like grassy pit paddock is now looking more like a battlefield from WW1. Trenches are dug to channel the water, but it’s too late. Vehicles without four-wheel drive don’t stand a chance in the greasy mud, especially with a trailer in tow, and the landowner’s blue tractor busily moves from one axle-deep disaster to the next. Huddled under umbrellas, people in gumboots trudge through the knee-deep mud, exchanging raised-eyebrow, what-do- you-do smiles. The off-road community is a hardy mob who don’t mind roughing it, but on this occasion, even they have to resign themselves to the ridiculous. And laugh. By lunchtime, it’s so dark, you’d swear the sun was setting. Missing riders are finally rounded up, and the relentless rain leaves organisers no option but to call it. It’s not the ideal way for a national championship to be wrapped up, but they have little choice in the matter. “Mate, if you want a drought broken, just ask to stage a round of the AORC,” a Junior dad says in the pits. “For years, dust was the bane of our existence. But for the past two seasons, we’ve barely had a dry race.”

Over in the Ballard’s Yamaha Off-Road camp, the celebrations begin. Chris Hollis – who’d won the AORC crown with the Yami team in ’08, before a stint in Europe – has held on to clinch the Outright title and E2 class win. Team owner, Geoff Ballard, is grinning so hard, it’s as if his moustache in joining in the festivities. After playing second fiddle to the KTM Off-Road team throughout last year’s AORC, Ballard’s boys are back. Hollis and Stefan Merriman take class wins and, along with Matt Phillips, the trio claim 1-2-3 in the Outright standings.

In the middle of the mud-stained mayhem, GB gives me a quick nod and scurries off to his campervan. He appears seconds later with a bottle of champers and surprises Hollis with its bubbly contents. Hollis graciously accepts hugs and congratulations from teammates, friends and family, soon followed by the guys from Team KTM, who sportingly come over to the Yamaha truck to shake his hand. After Hollis cleans himself up, I remind him we’ve got a date on AJ Roberts’ burgundy couch – the ugly slab of junkyard furniture I’d interviewed him on at the penultimate round, and which he’d promised to return to if he clinched the Outright. I sit the thing in the middle of the Ballard’s pit awning and await the champ’s arrival. With my video guy MIA for the weekend, I sheepishly ask Ballard if he wouldn’t mind doing the honours. “No problems. What do I do?,” he asks.

In the interview, Hollis is vintage Hollis – upbeat, no bullshit, devoid of ego. He offers up the fact that he hadn’t actually won a round Outright, and that consistency had been the key to his season. And he thanks his team for their support in down-to-earth, genuine language.

Knowing that Ballard is yet to sign Hollis for 2012, I figure an interview with GB might make for interesting viewing, so I look around for another suitable stand-in cameraman. “Here, give that camera here,” Hollis says, reading my mind. “I’ll do it.”

I half think that Hollis’s presence might make it difficult for GB to speak openly, but it’s too late. The champ’s creative juices are flowing and he’s already explaining how he plans to shoot the thing. After GB and I clear our throats and get ready for ‘action’, Hollis tells us he’s been filming for half a minute and that we oughta get on with it.

‘Probably not the sort of thing that’d happen in the national motocross pits’, I think to myself later that night. Which is exactly what makes the Aussie Off-Road Championship scene so cool. Some blokes are champions, in every sense of the word.