New Zealand champ for 2011 HBBB

Kiwi Dave Hiscock will return to the track for the first time in decades for the 2011 Honda Broadford Bike Bonanza (HBBB) at Easter (April 22-24).

At the HBBB, Hiscock will be reunited with one of the ‘Plastic Fantastic’ Suzukis – the second of two machines built, originally ridden by fellow New Zealander Norris Farrow and now owned by Blair Briggs.

For a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hiscock was rated as one of the best four-stroke racers in the world, equally at home on big production bikes or the early form of Superbikes.

He was a regular front-runner in the big production races like the Castrol 6-Hour, but showed his true versatility by mastering the revolutionary Suzuki TT Formula One machines built by Steve Roberts in New Zealand.

In 1981, Roberts and Hiscock took the Suzuki to the Isle of Man to contest the prestigious F1 event.

Despite little knowledge of the treacherous circuit, Hiscock put in a lap of 113.7mph from a standing start, but the engine expired on the second lap.

A few weeks later, at Donington Park, the engine locked up again, this time throwing Hiscock off and leaving him with a serious knee injury.

With unfinished business, the pair was back at the TT in 1982, where Dave scored a brilliant third place in the F1 race against factory teams from Suzuki and Honda.

Later that year, he won the Swann Insurance International Series in Australia.

In 1983 Roberts and Hiscock were back at the TT with an even more radical creation featuring a Carbon/Kevlar monocoque chassis – the so-called ‘Plastic Fantastic’ – and finished eighth in the F1 race.

By this stage Dave’s knee injury was giving him serious trouble and he retired from racing following the 1983 Swann Series, where he finished third on the Kevlar Suzuki.

Dave’s brother Neville Hiscock was also a brilliant rider, but tragically passed away in a crash in South Africa in 1983.

Click on the following link for more information on the 2011 Honda Broadford Bike Bonanza.