ARCHIVE Mick Doohan still owns this special machine
With this month’s test on the rare Yamaha RZV500R, we figured we’d show this as-rare shot from Mick Doohan’s own archive of the time he rode one. In the mid-1980s and with Mick’s riding raising a few eyebrows, the young Aussie hooked up with Jon Macgillvray, who owned a Yamaha RZV500 that he ended up putting Doohan on. The two would become firm friends and Jon would later become Mick’s manager. In 1985 they had a great idea: paint the bike in camouflage, make Mick ride in leathers with camo overalls on (‘I’d puff up like the Michelin man’) and erect a military-style tent where the team could hang out and enjoy some beers with a barbecue. A year later the camo was gone and instead the team got some backing and became ‘Gaythorne Yamaha’, now complete with an RZ250 (think RD350 F) with which
they would enter whatever races they could – including the Surfers 3-Hour endurance race. In Mat Oxley’s superb biography ‘Mick Doohan – Thunder from Down Under’ Mick talks about his riding style on the proddie RZS: “I’d get the thing sliding with the momentum, then have it bouncing around. All the top guys were passing me on the straights and I’d be passing them back in the turns. I was leaving black lines, hanging it out.” Michael Dowson – a handy Aussie racer himself, of the time recalls: “Even on the RZ250 he had this crazy style he’d got from dirt riding – all the emphasis on the front. He just let the rear look after itself!” The Haynes book ‘Mick Doohan – Thunder from Down Under’ can still be found on Amazon. For more on Haynes, go to page 114 and for Mat Oxley’s latest book, see page 11.