In 1979, Mount Panorama in Bathurst, New South Wales was hosting the big event of the year over Easter. It was also notable for being the comeback race for veteran racer, Ron Toombs, who’d been absent from racing of fours year after a serious crash at Amaroo Park in 1975. While he hadn’t officially retired, no one expected see him racing again.
Ron’s career began in the 1950’s when he paired with a friend to ride a G80 Matchless in a two hour production race at the newly opened Mount Druitt circuit. It wasn’t an auspicious start - they finished many laps down on the leaders, but they did finish.
Things started to improve for Ron when he met Tony Henderson, who bought a BSA DBD34 Gold Star to race for himself before realising his talent lay with the spanners, not the throttle. Tony offered the bike to Ron to race and he promptly won the Senior Non-Experts Final. The main 500cc Grand Prix didn’t go quite so well - both rider and machine crashing after a rear brake failure, doing significant damage to both.
While Ron recovered, the bike was rebuilt and lightened. The BSA frame was scrapped and replaced with a Norton ‘featherbed’ unit along with magnesium hubs from a AJS 7R. Even with the rebuilt engine it wasn’t competive against tthe Senior GP bikes so a Matchless G50 engine was dropped in and the Henderson Matchless was born.
In 1966, ‘Toombsie’ was supreme at Bathhurst. He won the Junior 350cc GP, on his own AJS 7R, then the Senior and Unlimited GP on the Matchless.
A string of wins from 1967 to 1971 at Bathurst secured his reputation as the king of the mountain, as Toombs, Henderson and the fleet of bikes, now including two ‘Daytona’ Yamahas - a 250cc TD2 and a 350cc TR2 - travelled up and down the East Coast weekend after weekend, scoring numerous wins at Phillip Island, Calder, Lakeside, Oran Park, Amaroo, Surfers Paradise and Hume Weir.
At a time when most of his original contemporaries had hung up their leathers, Ron signed to race in the local scene on one of the first air-cooled Kawasaki H2R 750 triple cylinder racers built for the F750 formula. giving him the chance to race in the Daytona 200 in 1974.
(Name those riders…)
Kawasaki Heavy Industries of Japan officially took over the team in 1975 to create Team Kawasaki Australia. One week after winning the Australian Unlimited Tourist Trophy at Lakeside, Ron was at a non-championship Open meeting at Amaroo Park where he dropped the Kawasaki on a fast right hand sweeper and badly smashed his right elbow. It was a serious and complicated injury, requiring the insertion of a steel plate that restricted movement. After months of treatment and physiotherapy failed to return the strength and movement to his arm, Ron finally had to call it a day, 25 years after it all started.
And so, four years later, it was a big surprise to see number 63 on the grid again. In the same way that Mike Hailwood’s return to the Isle of Man the previous year was viewed with considerable trepidation, many felt that Ron had nothing left to prove. In Sunday’s Senior GP, Ron made a modest start, completing the first lap in 15th position. Perhaps unsurprising after such a long lay off, he didn’t seem to be the inch-perfect master of old, although his best lap was good enough for sixth place. By lap six he was up to 8th, but exiting the Dipper, his right shoulder glanced the fence, putting him off line on the exit from the downhill corner and over the inside edge of the track. His Yamaha hit a large tree head-on, pitching him over the handlebars.
Ron was rushed to hospital. Later that afternoon, a hush descend on the circuit and pits as the news came that Ron Toombs, the King of the Mountain, had died.
