“We had planned to race the Superbike at the Coca
Cola 800 at Oran Park, which was an 8 Hour race in
February 1981. We were still building the bike as we
were travelling to Sydney because it was such a big
undertaking. Gary Coleman was the co rider. On the
first day, he jumped on and did half a dozen laps and
came in and said, “We’re going to win the race, no
problem’. I didn’t believe him but he was quite sure.
Then it rained and we won the race by seven laps,
but Gary said the bike was so rider-friendly and easy
to ride that we just walked away.
“We then decided we would run at Bathurst in
April, so we had a TZ750, TZ500 and the XS1100 for
Greg to ride. Unfortunately at Bathurst there was
only one practice session for all those bikes, so Greg
had to go out and do two laps on one, come in, two
laps on the next one and so on. It was the first time
we had run the TZ500 and I hadn’t had a chance to
do the jetting on it and it was jetted way too rich
and even though I put 30 litres of fuel in it he ran
out of fuel on the last lap when he was second. But
he won on the 750 and in the Arai 500 he rode the
XS and won by about a lap and that became folklore
because it was a legendary bike that had a 100%
winning record.”All change
That could have been the end of the story for the
chain-drive XS1100, but Yamaha Pitmans allowed
Pretty to take it to Winton in Victoria for the opening
round of the NGK Superbike Series in May 1981, along
with a mechanic. However Pretty failed to make it to
the grid after stepping off the Yamaha during practice,
damaging it too extensively to make the race. The
bike went back to Adelaide with immediate plans for
a further outing. That matter was settled when Pretty
dropped a bombshell by taking up an offer to join
Team Honda, whose lead rider Dennis Neill had
suffered career-ending injuries at Bathurst. It was a
move that floored Pitmans, and severely cooled their
enthusiasm for racing. In fact, it was just a further
element in a chain of events that would change thecompany’s traditional business role, as Mal Pitman
explains. “So we lost Greg, and the next year the
government devalued the Australian dollar. We were
importers so the family business decided we had to
get rid of our race bikes, so they were all sold off. I
had a guy, Colin Dymock, who used to come through
each year when he was on holidays and he would
always ask me if he could buy the XS1100 Superbike.
I said it wasn’t for sale but about the third or fourth
time he came through I said I’d sell it to him. He had
eleven XS1100s so he had serious issues! He took it
away and gave me his phone numbers at home and
at work and I said if you ever want to sell it let me
know. I rang up about five or six years later but both
numbers had changed, so I lost contact and the bike
basically disappeared for about 35 years, but he never
told anyone he had it.
“Then John Testore, who had worked for the NSW
Yamaha distributors, McCulloch and used to service
Colin’s XS1100s, was talking to him. Colin had
become quite ill and was having trouble walking, so
he took John down to his garden shed and said to
him, ‘I’ve got the Yamaha Pitmans XS1100 chain-
drive’, and John said ‘no way’, so he told him to go
into the shed and look for himself. Unfortunately the
roof had fallen in on the shed so the bike was badly
weathered, but John knew straight away what it was
and bought it from Colin and promptly rang me up
and told me had had the bike. I kept that in the back
of my mind and I was pretty keen to buy it because
I’d always wanted to own it from back in the day.
“Then in December 2017 PCRC rang me up and
said they were having this 30 Years Celebration of
Superbikes at the International Festival of Speed in
March and could you bring the chain-drive XS? So I
rang John and he said ‘I was going to ring you, I am
pretty keen to get the thing restored’. So he brought
the bike to the Australian Historic titles in 2017 at
Goulburn and I took it back to Adelaide and got to
work on the bike. It was a very tight schedule; it
was only finished on the Tuesday of the week of
IFoS. It’s not completely finished to my satisfaction
but it has come up very nice although the
carburation needs sorting out.A rapid restoration
With scarcely three months to completely restore the
bike, Mal Pitman had his work cut out, but despite
the bike’s enforced hibernation, the task was not
quite as daunting as it could have been. “The
ABOVE CENTREFront brakes look a bit antediluvian exhaust valves were stuck open and two of the
but perform quite well. ABOVE Not much to watch.
RIGHTNew outrigger
bearing housing
was specially
made in 1981.