Five Minutes With… Wayne Gardner
Interview and photos by Mark Gardiner

By becoming Australia’s first motorcycle World Champion in 1987, Wayne Gardner dramatically raised the profile of motorcycle racing down under. With a population of about 20 million, Australia produced a disproportionate number of GP and Superbike competitors after Gardner showed the way.

After he won the title for Honda (with crew chief Jeremy Burgess, who later guided Mick Doohan and Valentino Rossi to multiple titles), the company responded by radically changing the 500cc NSR, and Gardner failed to come to terms with the machine the following season. He was further dismayed when Honda hired Eddie Lawson.

After a string of 52 GPs without a crash, Gardner was caught out by a few nasty falls, and he realized that he could only roll the dice so many times before it was going to come up snake eyes. In 1992, he announced his retirement at Donington Park, then went out and won the race.

RRX : Are you married? Do you have children?
Wayne Gardner: I got married and divorced. I have a girlfriend, Toni; it amounts to being married. We have two boys. Luca is 5 and Remy is 7.

Have you completely retired from the motorcycle business?
No, not at all. I have a parts-distribution business, Wayne Gardner Enterprises; it’s sort of like an Australian Parts Unlimited—but much smaller, of course! I started it before I went to Europe, so it’s pretty established now. I go in about one day a week.

And your main business is developing real estate?
Yeah, I’ve got a few projects going right now; a residential subdivision with about 20 homes, as well as some office and industrial properties.

After retiring from GPs, did you get straight into car racing?
Yeah, it’s an interesting subject, what you do after life …

“After life”? That’s a Freudian slip if I’ve ever heard one.
[Chuckles] It’s a huge adjustment, and that’s why I took up car racing. I wanted to try it out, and at the end of ’92, I did a couple of big races, like the Bathurst. I did all right, and at the end of the season I was invited to test with Holden [General Motors’ main brand in Australia], and I was pretty quick, so they invited me to join the team. For the following year, I was a factory driver. I won some races, but I was frustrated with the team. I wanted to do more testing, but they said, “If you can get more sponsorship, we can do more testing.” In fact, Holden told me, “We’re not that satisfied with the owner, Tom Walkinshaw, so if you can get sponsors, you can take over the team.”

I lined up Coca-Cola, but Tom Walkinshaw flew in from England and said “You’re not having my team.” The next thing I know, I’m in a shit-fight with Holden. I ended up starting my own team, Wayne Gardner Racing, and we raced touring cars in Australia for five or six years with Coke sponsorship.

After a few years, I was invited to test a GT car in Japan, because I was still popular over there. They had said, “We want you to bring some sponsorship,” but when I broke the lap record, they offered to just pay me to drive. Frankly, that was a lot easier than running my own team.

Did you ever test in F1?
Yeah, I was involved in a publicity stunt when the Australian [F1 car] GP came one year. They wanted me to do a few demo laps. When I was actually pretty quick, Lotus invited me to a real test in England. But they were on the way down by then and nothing really came of it.

There’s lots of talk about Rossi moving to F1. Do you think he should give it a try?
Pretty difficult. I’m sure he could get in a car and drive around pretty fast, but it’d be pretty difficult. It’s the absolute pinnacle, and the cars are extremely fast with lots and lots of downforce. He’s probably got the talent for it, and Bernie [Ecclestone] wants him in there, but there’ll be too much pressure for him to get up to speed too quickly. You can’t say, “He needs one season to practice,” because he needs more than that. Most of those drivers have been driving since they were five years of age. Personally, I think it’s impossible—I don’t think the fans would give him the time to learn, and you don’t learn in F1 anyway, you do that in lower classes. Maybe in rallying, where there’s not the intense focus of attention.

And where there might be more transference of skills from motorcycling…
Yeah, there’s not the grip.

At the time you raced in GPs, there were a lot of riders who could win on any given day—Doohan, Schwantz, Rainey, Lawson, among others. Do you think there’s an asterisk on Rossi’s record, because there’s not much competition for him?
No. It’s not his fault that he’s 10 percent better than anyone else out there.

[At this point, Australian rugby great Nathan Grey, who had joined us for coffee in San Diego’s Caffe Italia asked, “Is that him being better, or the bike being better?”]

It’s him being better, and making the bike better. He can give the team and manufacturer direction to make the bike better. He’s like Michael Schumacher in F1. Coupled with Jeremy [Burgess], Valentino can give a well-funded team the direction they need.

Do you find yourself thinking, “I’m glad he wasn’t on the track when I was?”
It’d have been interesting, and I’m sure Kevin, and Eddie, and Wayne Rainey would say the same thing. Maybe he wouldn’t have been as dominant, but… I can just go on what I see now, and he’s 10 to 20 percent better than anyone else. Personally, I think he’s the greatest rider of all time.

Almost all motorcycle racers convince themselves that, ‘It can’t happen to me’. You’re one of the few top-level racers who has spoken openly about the fear of getting injured.
Yeah, my fear was getting really seriously injured—like, paralyzed—and ending up in a wheelchair. I was almost obsessed with it at times. When I came back from a broken leg for the ’92 season, that kind of did me. I thought, If I keep taking chances… After I stopped racing, I missed it terribly, but the next year Wayne [Rainey] had his accident at Misano. I thought, That could’ve been me.

Do your kids ride motorbikes?
Yeah, they wanted mini bikes, so I got them some—then I bought a farm so they’d have a place to ride.

Is it a producing farm?
Yeah, we run cattle on it. I always wanted a farm, and we found that the grass was growing faster than the kids could beat it down with the minibikes, so we bought some four-legged mowers.

Are you a cowboy, then?
No! I hired some cowboys.

If your sons wanted to be motorcycle racers, how would you feel about it?
I’d take the same attitude my dad took, which was “If he really wants to do it, it’s not up to me to decide how he lives his life.” I don’t want them to do it; I think it’s dangerous, and I’m like any protective parent. But if they want to do it more than anything else and they’re passionate and driven by it… so be it. I’ll worry like hell, but I’ll support it.

Kids are starting to race at younger and younger ages. Do you think any 7- or 8-year-old can make an informed decision about going racing, or are they being driven by their parents?
Yeah, the dreaded minibike parent; it’s a problem. They’ve never had a chance to do it, so they try to live through their kids.

It’s one thing to push your kid to go swimming, but it’s another to push your kid to do something as dangerous as motorcycle racing.
Exactly. You take Rossi—he was basically born on a minibike, but when you see him ride, it’s clear he takes great joy in it. He had the opportunity, I’m sure, but Graziano never pushed him into it. But other kids… if there’s not the passion to do it, if they don’t wake up thinking about it every morning, then it’s a recipe for disaster.

I don’t push my kids at all. In terms of competition, my wife hopes they don’t want that, and I guess I do too. They are drilled pretty hard [on safety]: helmets, gloves, boots… It helps their balance, eye-hand coordination, and teaches responsibility. I think it’s very, very good for children to ride minibikes.

Are you still riding?
Yeah. About a year ago, a new Australian magazine called Rapid asked me to do some testing, so I’ve been getting back into the leathers. I just finished a comparison test of all the 1000s—it was fantastic. Shit, I still love to go hard.

Thanks for your time.
No worries, mate.