Beverley Re-enactment 2014 I could smell it before I saw it, enticing and heady. Weaving along Spencer’s Brook road on my DKW, I recognised the whiff of Castrol R and some unburnt fuel from a high performance vintage motorcycle. Bill Young and Charlie Lawson would have approved. I went over the second railway crossing, almost sideways, caught the edge of the bitumen with my front wheel and I hung onto the wires, with an almighty roar we hurtled forward, towards Northam, there were more bends in the road than a bucket full of brown snakes. There were flak bursts of daisies and bluebells along the roadside. I came over the brow of the next hill with both wheels clean off the ground, like a pedigree racehorse executing a steeplechase manoeuvre. At the apex, I stood on the footpegs and looked forward, there he was, darting towards the next sharp left turn. It was John Sinclair on his Grindlay Peerless. We were doing Beverley again. Not the actress Beverley Mitchell, Esmeralda but the re-enactment of the first motor race in the Southern Hemisphere, from the small wheatbelt town of Beverley, 100 miles to the east of Perth. Back in 1904, a handful of dedicated motorcyclists would have set off from the hamlet, along rough gravel roads or rudimentary paths back to the fledgling town of Perth on the lower Swan. Several people have been muttering about the preparation that I do on my mounts for an event, so for this year’s event, I decided to ride the old girl from Adelaide to Darwin, to iron out all the bugs, once and for all. Indeed, I was deep down an opal mine in Coober Pedy, with Graeme Hammond and he said to me “Hey cobber, your back tyre doesn’t look so flash” So shortly afterwards, he changed my tyre and also sprayed some release fluid onto the pivot of my points cam follower. He also encouraged me to polish the bike about two or three times a day. So by the time it came to the Saturday event, Phil Skinner’s the “Day before” event, the red charger was fully sorted. I rode out to Bill Cowlin’s house, where Roger Bowen was already drinking coffee and kicking Sloper tyres with Bill. We loaded up the DKW on Bill’s trailer between the green Slopers, like a Bull Mastiff between two Pomeranians and Val drove…