Barry Jones

Interview with Barry Jones

Interview by Matt Compton
25th Aug 2019

Barry
Well, I started working on Guzzis back in 1981 at Bol d’Or, which was a bit of an esoteric bike shop in Melbourne. Peter Stevens were the Guzzi importers for the east coast of Australia at the time. Ted had established his own independent import arrangements with the factory for the west coast, arguing the tyranny of distance.

Matt
Fair enough.

Barry
Yeah exactly, so while Peter Stevens carried an admirable range of parts at reasonable prices, they could not be relied on to carry everything of every model. Ted differentiated himself by buying one example of each Guzzi model and stripping them for spare parts. Prices were higher but availability was assured.

Matt
Wow, thats interesting …

Barry
Thus I started regularly dealing with Ted, Mrs S [Dulcie, Ted’s wife] and Derrick chasing parts and we established a friendly relationship. I think it was later that year while visiting Sherees’ relatives in Perth that I spent a day visiting at Stolarskis. The relationship was cemented but we didn’t meet again personally until 1993.

Matt
So what happened in 93?

Barry
That was when Ted started using our home as his base when he visited the east coast on several occasions.

Matt
That’s cool, good on ya!

Barry
Ted certainly returned the favour later that year when he asked me to accompany himself and Mario Poggioli to Italy for three weeks. I didn’t pay for a thing, he was very generous with those who supported him.

Matt
Ah fantastic, that’s wonderful! It must’ve been a great trip, what’s some of your memories of that trip?

Barry
One highlight was the lunch in the executive dining room at Piaggio, very flash!

At the Milan show, I remember Ted walking past the release of the 916 believing it was a race bike. When I corrected him, he looked worried … for good reason!

Matt
[Laughing]

Barry
I finally got to meet Bruno Scola, the bugger had a hot cam in stock for my Nuovo Falcone, that was a surprise!

Whilst over there we met with a lot of well known names; Todero, Dongi, Dr. John Wittner, Gemma Pedretta, Alis Agostini, the Magnis, Oscar Rumi, Marco Fierra, Hans Rinner [WP/Hyperpro suspension]. It was quite the experience.

Matt
I bet!

Barry
Oh and I also bumped into my mate, Bruce Collins, in a side street in Milan, neither of us knew the other was there. [Laughing]

Matt
That’s an awesome coincidence.

Barry
Yeah, it was. One of the days, while enjoying lunch on Guzzi, I cut a prawn, spraying the fragrant juices across the table, perfectly targeting Mario’s best shirt he wore in preparation for meeting with Dongi [Director of Guzzi] after lunch. Then the rush was on to buy a new Shirt! We laughed SO HARD!! Mario didn’t …

Matt
Oh, no! [Laughing]

Barry
Ted was always such a quick thinker. One time we were in Modena at a spare parts warehouse and one of the guys there was trying to convince us that there was nothing wrong with Valeo starter motors and Ducati regulators. This was while I’m literally standing at the returns bench which was covered by Valeo starter motors and only two Bosch. I was shocked there were that many Bosch returns! Ted was brilliant; he came up with a story that the police services in Australia specify only Bosch equipment! He saved us from the crap for a couple of years. [Laughing]

Matt
Ted was always ready with just the perfect story. [Laughing]

Barry
For sure, he was. So, you’ve got Ted’s other beast?

Matt
Yeah, I’ve owned the other one since about 1995.

Barry
Yeah I remember it was built a year or two after mine. It had the better forks on it, I think they were Forcella Italia or something like that?

Matt
No, WP Racing upside down front forks and WP Racing rear as well.

Barry
WP forks, that’s right, beautiful! What was the engine number on yours out of curiosity? Michael Clarke up in NSW has been after me to sell mine to him, but no, I really don’t want to sell it, my son would kill me.

Matt
While doing the Facebook group I bumped into someone with the surname of Jones and I was wondering if it was your son cos I’m sure there was a photo of him with someone who I was fairly sure was you. One with him standing with you beside a Guzzi and one with him racing what I was fairly sure was your bike.

Barry
Oh yeah that was probably my son Ben. Yeah, he’d never let me part with it, he enjoys riding it too much.

Matt
Very understandable, they’re great fun. I’ve found a lot of interesting connections since starting the Facebook group, looking to try to get more history and more photos, because I’d also like to make a website about these two bikes.

Barry
Yeah, look it’s a good idea to try and gather the information. Cos some of the stuff I’ve had with mine has been quite challenging. The people who were around at the time only have so many memories. Mario [Poggioli] has been very helpful, he was around, and we were around about 12 months or so later after Ted had the thing built. Later it came over to Victoria and we ended up looking after it over here. It went through various phases along the way. It was bastardised and knocked around. Yeah so we’ve got a reasonable piece of the history of it together. We are pretty happy with how far we’ve gone so far. But yeah Michael Clarke asked me a question recently about the engine numbers. He was at the factory, they’ve got one of the engines in at the factory …

Matt
One of the prototype ones?

Barry
… Yeah, and that’s got engine number such and such. I think it was Michael, or possibly Teo Lamers, who saw another engine over in Holland, stamped as engine #3, yet mines got #111. I wrote to the factory about it to try and get some information. They said, “No that number doesn’t exist, so it has come out of the experimental department”.

Matt
If I recall correctly when I spoke to the factory years ago they said a very similar thing to me. My engine number is 112.

Barry
Oh well there you go, so they’re sequential. That is really good to know. So, I wonder why the one at the factory has just got #1 on it. Anyway it doesn’t really matter, we know ours are genuine. Even if you tried to get two engines numerically perfect out of the Italians, you never would. In my factory once, around 1983, I had the first two 750SS square cases ever made. One had engine #1 frame #2 and the other had engine #2 and frame #1.

Matt
[Laughing] That’s sounds totally right.

Barry
We had them both standing side by side. Peter Hempenstal ended up with one, I can’t remember who got the other one. Yeah it was just hysterical, only the bloody Italians could do this. They could have matching numbers but, no, why? [Laughing]

Matt
[Laughing] That’s it, I know what you mean. I quickly ran into those kinds of quirks on a regular basis after my brother and I took over Webrooks. Have you heard of Brook Henry’s Vee Two and his custom bikes, like the Alchemy, etc?

Barry
Yeah I know the bikes. I know the man, I used to buy gearboxes off Brook.

Matt
This had initially been Brook’s motorcycle shop, which he’d sold to Clive Brannan, and Brook was still running Vee Two from the factory unit behind us. This is where we first met Ted Stolarski when he offered us new Moto Guzzis on consignment.

Barry
Peter Stevens did the same thing for me with Bol D’Or in the early eighties, worked well for both of us.

Matt
It does work well, yeah, and so the relationship grew from there until Ted eventually asked us to take over his entire WA retail operation. We renamed it Pro-Italia, but only ended up being in the the industry for maybe another two years or so. But we did well and enjoyed our time there; in the first year we took over from Ted, I think we doubled the bikes and the accessory sales almost exactly to the dollar.

Barry
Wow.

Matt
When we first moved in Ted’s grandson, Clinton Rogers, was an apprentice and he stayed on with us, fantastic young man. We also asked Mario to stay on as our senior mechanic. He was weighing up the offer but finally decided to go out on his own and start up Thunderbikes. Which was a better move for him anyway, he’s still going strong in there to this day.

Barry
Yeah it probably was. He bought all the parts off Mrs S and he probably got it for a good price. He and Ted were very passionate about each other, they loved each other to death, they were fabulous people. In fact I was just speaking to Mario yesterday about his trip to Italy. He was saying that the last holiday he had was when he, Ted and I went to Italy together in 1993. So it was thirty years ago he had his last holiday … bloody crazy!

Matt

Yeah Mario’s great. He’s had my bike sitting in his showroom for nearly 20 years.

Barry
Oh has he? Oh fabulous, I’m sure he’d just be proud to show it off.

Matt
Yes, I often say to him, “Look, I’ve got to start paying, it’s just sitting there year after year with free storage”, but he goes, “No no, it’s a great talking point, don’t worry about it”.

Barry
Yeah, bloody oath, it’s a piece of history, a fabulous piece of history! If you ever consider selling, I’m sure Michael Coates up in Bathurst would be interested. He’s got a collection of just about every 8-valve made. Hence the reason he wants mine, and probably yours, I’m sure he’d like to have both. He bought Dr John’s race bike recently and all his parts. Plus he bought Amedeo Castellini’s Raceco Guzzi and all his stock for parts too.

Matt
Whoa, sounds like an awesome collection.

Barry
Yeah, there’s actually some surprising depth to a number of collections in our area of the world. There’s people like Ron Angel, with the largest private collection in the Southern Hemisphere that nobody’s ever seen. He brings half a dozen of the rarest motorcycles in the world out at Broadford every year. He’s an avid collector just like Peter Jackson in New Zealand with his vintage Aircraft.

Matt
Wow, so Peter Jackson, that name sounds familiar, is that the Lord of the Rings guy?

Barry
Yep, that’s him. He owns an air museum over in New Zealand, there’s a huge stadium in there with First World War aircraft, some of the rarest anywhere, like, “There’s only one of this one left in the world or two of this one left in the world”. He just looks out for whatever aircraft, first war biplanes, second war fighter planes. He’s got a person on the internet full time just looking for them for him. It’s phenomenal, it’s a huge museum. Massive collection, just fabulous! There is an annual event that’s flown out of that air museum cos all his aircraft are flying examples.

Matt
That’s interesting, are they really?

Barry
Yeah, they pull them out once a year and fly them. Spectacular stuff! I’d love to go there one day while my arse still points to the ground.

Matt
That would be amazing.

Something I was wondering about P1, did your bike have the hand modified gearbox like Ted said he'd done to mine? Apparently he’d modify the dogs, doing what Amedeo Castellani called a "Slick Shift Conversion". I assume that's what you meant you'd done to the CR gearbox your friend swapped for your standard one?

Barry
What we did was the same as Ducati and almost every other manufacturer did, rather than use six engaging dogs on each gear, we would reduce the number to three.

Matt
Ah I see…

Barry
Whether it involved redesigning the gear or grinding off half the engaging dogs, it all achieved a similar result. The latter left a fair amount of backlash which would be uncomfortable on the road but for a race bike not a problem. The end result was more space between the dogs so aligning the dogs during a shift was faster and the shift was executed faster. Mine changes ‘like a Jap bike’.

Matt
Yeah mine too!

Barry
Light weight full synthetic oil also helps the speed of the shift.

Matt
Hmmm…. I can’t remember what we used to run when I raced. Clinton Rogers did all the mechanical work on my bike at the time.

Barry
From memory, in the original wide ratio gearbox fitted to Prototype #1, half the dogs were ground off on the 1-2 and the 2-3 shift; 4 and 5 were left. When I modified the CR all intermediate engaging dogs were removed on all gears and sleeves.

Matt
Very interesting.

Barry
Anyway … at one stage, there was basically Dr John, Amedeo Castellini, Tadeo Jingushi and myself who were racing the fastest Guzzis around the world. We were racing and watching what each other was doing. I met with John Wittner in Italy when he was working at the factory. Went over a few other ideas he had about reversing heads and other bits and pieces for getting better gas flow out of the things and so forth. It was a good period, I say let’s get some race bikes happening again, let’s get some fast Guzzis out there. They were world champions more times than bloody Honda up until recently.

Matt
Fully agree, there’s definitely still a market for sporty Guzzis. As I’ve been connecting with enthusiasts through the Facebook group I’ve learnt of a number of companies making some amazing kits. Like Ipothesys, GT Motorcycles, Radical Guzzi and a few other different places that are making some very trick looking Guzzi specials. You need a donor engine, gearbox and shaft drive but they can look amazing.

Barry
Oh yeah, for sure! You can build your own stuff easy enough, it doesn’t have to be complicated. With what I’ve done with my bike I love to tell people that it puts out around 130 horsepower at the crank, and it’s still got points and carburettors. Then I run it total loss, I use Bosch GT40R coils and just run points and condensers. Where points fail is at extremely high RPM with many cylinders. We are running high RPM but we’ve only got one cylinder per contact point, so it’s like a four cylinder car doing 2000 revs. They’re hardly doing any work, so it’s not a problem. We’re still using the Dell’Orto 40mm carburettors, they’re great carbies.

Anyway, when Ted came back from Daytona with the first prototype, he raced it over in New Zealand and then he took it back to Perth and raced it there quite a lot. He then gave it to John Buskus at A1 motorcycles, who had become a Moto Guzzi dealer. They took it on and at that time the wheels and bodywork were painted red. I think they raced it for about 6-12 months, at different circuits around the country.

Soon after that Ted flew over. He stayed at my house and we were chatting about the bike one night and he said, “I think it’s about time that you had the bike, cos it’s getting to the point now where we need an engineer to have it and develop it”. So we got it back off Buskus and put it in the factory and I ran it up on the dyno and the thing only had 70hp, it might have been 75hp. So I just tuned it up as it was, set the timing properly and tuned the carbies, things like that. We got it to about 80hp without any other modifications.

About late 94, Ted died and Mrs S rang me up a month or so later, the bike was still sitting in the workshop. She said, “Look, Ted wanted you to have the bike as a way to say thanks for all your effort racing and promoting Guzzis for the last 15-20 years”. I didn’t have any spare money at the time so we made a deal and I paid it off.

After that was the World Superbikes support race. Also Battle of the Twins was big at the time and BEARS racing was getting bigger and bigger. So we pulled the bike down, had a look to see what we had to work with. Now it was mine I felt free to do what I liked with it, so we got a bit more enthusiastic at the end of the season. We put bigger valves in it, bigger cams, cleaned up the ports. Made an individual megaphone exhaust system for it. Lightened the crank and flywheel, shot peened the rods and cryogenic treated them. Various bits and pieces, just the things I normally did, got it up to 112hp at the back wheel.

Matt
That’s a big jump.

Barry
Yeah, added another 30hp to the thing, and then it was quite good! Especially with a good rider who understood how to ride it. With Martin Hone riding it we got third in the support race at the World Supers, behind the Britten and the factory Ducati. So yeah, we did well! I’ve still got the trophy and I still drink beer out of it. [Laughing]

Matt
That’s awesome!

Barry
The photo I emailed you is from the 1997 Thunderbike Trophy Race. Martin Hone was our rider and we’d chosen wets, unfortunately the track dried out during the race, but he still placed a very respectable third. Around this time we experimented with various modifications, you can see many of these in the photo. The box section alloy swingarm and floating bevel drive is fairly obvious, you'll also notice a different exhaust system.

Matt
Ah, yes …

Barry
This is a twin reverse-cone megaphone and muffler system made from aluminium, constructed to move the power curve up to suit high speed circuits. While there was a slight sacrifice through the midrange, there was a few horsepower increase at the top, ideal for Phillip Island.

We also experimented with a big-bang engine, giving similar improvements across the range. However the engine characteristics were very harsh so we returned to standard firing order. Harder to see in the photo is the carburettor air dam. The carbs are protected from engine heat as cold air is piped through ducting under the tank. The fabricated fork brace can be seen quite clearly. What you can’t see in the pic is the floating rear calliper and the crank mounted Bosch ignition.

Another memorable time was at the Island Classic in 2003. It was “Italian Year - The Return of Agostini”. A bunch of amazing riders there, Romero Columbo, Umberto Masetti, Alfio Micheli, Giacomo Agostini and others. You can see Alfio beside me in the photo along with his Moto Guzzi 120 degree 500 V-twin, 1930’s Grand Prix bike.

It was a massive event, the MVs, Gilera and Guzzis provided demonstration laps at various times over the weekend. At lunchtime on Sunday, Alfio roared into the pits on his 500, chucked his bike at someone, threw himself over the Magni and mono-ed out of the pits, holding the mono halfway down the straight. Ken Wooten (Mr. Honda) was standing next to me at the pit exit, struggling to pick his jaw up off the ground. Sadly there’s no photos, the pit lane cameras had been turned off for the lunch break.

Matt
Ahh, such a pity. I’ll have to see if we can connect with any spectators through the FB group and see if we can dig up a photo of the wheelie.

Barry
That would be fabulous! So, after those experiments we pretty much maintained a constant state of tune until Broadford three years ago [2016]. There was a big Guzzi event, where they brought the Moto Guzzi V8 out and all the other race bikes. A guest rider experienced a catastrophic engine failure while attempting to show our European visitors how quick it was. It’s been in bits ever since, but the engine’s mostly back together now on the bench. Every valve was bent, the cam lobes were smashed, every follower was smashed, the belts were broken, major Chernobyl.

Matt
Oh no!

Barry
So it’s getting worked on for its next outing, possibly with Simon Turner. He was up here a couple of years ago, he lives in Japan now.

Matt
Yes I’ve had a couple of chats to him recently. He told me if I ever consider selling it to not speak to anyone but to talk to him first.

Barry
[Laughing]. Ah, good on him! Lovely bloke!

Matt
Yes, agreed, he is a top bloke.

Barry
Yeah I know, Michael Coates emailed me after Broadford one year. He said, “Look I’m really interested in buying your bike”. A bit tongue-in-cheek, I emailed him back and said, “Thanks Michael, I’m not interested at the moment but if you want to join the queue I think it ends somewhere around Darwin”. [Laughing]

Matt
[Laughing] Ah that’s it, one of two in the world, I’m sure there’d be quite a few out there that would like to have it in their collections.

Barry
[Laughing] Oh absolutely! But yeah, we still have a bit of a laugh about that. So now we’re just working on getting it back from that catastrophic failure. The engine will be slightly detuned, I’ve dropped the compression down a whisker. We were running it up 13.8:1 but I’ve dropped it down to about 13.2. This will just soften it up a bit on the rods. The valve size and the cam lobe profiles will be the same. So it will still go alright, it will probably produce 105, 106hp at the back wheel, something like that, and that’s enough. It wheel stands most of the way down down the back straight at Broadford!

I’ve still got the original cams, they were a lovely grunty cam. I took a profile of them before I did the regrind, went through a couple of different camshafts. Got a set of C-kit cams that Mick Hone gave me which he had left over from when he was a dealer. We tried the C-kit cams and then we tried our own profiles. Italian cams are notoriously harsh while not being as effective as they could be, they’re quite harsh on valve trains. So we tried some other profiles we know from our local boys, the stuff we use on Benelli single racers, and came up with a profile that worked really nicely. You know, good, nice, long duration inlet cam with 13.5mm lift and a fairly short exhaust cam, with sufficient lift, not over the top, cos it’s always your exhaust valves that get tangled. So we were conservative on the exhaust and radical on the inlet, and yeah, it works beautiful; pulls like a train!

Matt
That’s awesome. Mine’s not hugely powerful, around 90hp, and it makes the power pretty low down. Even as it was, we had some great results, cos it’s just incredibly grunty, has a massive amount of torque. The one full season I did, we managed to beat all the Ducatis in the field, there was a 888 and a few 900SS models. Some of them had a lot of go, but the Guzzi upset every one of them. I hadn’t experienced Italian bikes before Webrooks, but I was instantly addicted, absolutely loved them. At first I thought, “I’ll never move past Ducatis!”, but then when the Moto Guzzis came along I thought, “Ah, ok, now these have me hooked even more than Ducatis !”.

Barry
[Laughing]

Matt
Riding P2 was just incredible though, it seemed like a natural extension of myself; I dunno, I just got it, or it got me! The torque, the brakes, the handling were all so amazing, I was always overtaking people off the grid or under brakes or in the twisty stuff.

Barry
That was the thing with Wanneroo, it was such a tight, twisty circuit. You didn’t need power, it’s like Broadford, you just need something that steers well. Where we found problems was at Phillip Island and Bathurst. Going over McPhillamy Park we were having all sorts of trouble. Our rider at the time ended up on the wrong side of the ripple strips a couple of times. Alan Curran was following John Ryan down through Bass Kink at Phillip Island and he could see the back wheel rocking sideways about 30mm with all the clearance in the swingarm. See you’ve got eight moving points, and each one of those has one thou clearance. Of course, that compounds and mathematically you end up with this huge amount of clearance over the whole thing. So when you’re cranked over for 5, 6, 7, 8 seconds, maybe longer and you’re on full power, things get tied up in knots very, very quickly.

I ended up building a box section alloy swingarm for it. A one-piece twin shock swingarm, rather than the parallelogram, which at Phillip island fixed all those problems. It wasn’t as nice on the shorter circuits, it was a lot harsher. It certainly kept the back wheel and front wheel in line. Oh, I also moved the wheels in line, they were 18mm out of alignment with the parallelogram! Closest I could get was 6mm. It was better as far as that goes and better suited for high speed circuits. All interesting stuff.

Matt
Do you have a record of your results on P1 from your club racing days?

Barry
No, I have none of the records from those days, but we weren’t racing for sheep stations either …

Matt
Understandable.

Barry
[Laughing] Actually I remember one clubby, late on the Sunday afternoon, the timekeepers rigged the grid so three of us larrikin mates were side by side at the back of the grid, Laverda, Honda & Magni.

Matt
Oh serious?

Barry
Yep. The Honda out-braked himself trying to overtake me at Honda corner and I ran out of fuel challenging the Laverda on the last lap!

Matt
Oh no! [Laughing]

Barry
Yeah, that’s what happens when you try to ride three classes at the same event. I just bloody forgot. [Laughing]

Matt
I know back when I was racing the stakes weren’t overly high either but one big goal I had was to bring my engine up to Amedeo’s 1288cc Raceco spec. But, in the end, it was probably perfect for me as it was cos I was very inexperienced, I only raced the one season in 1995. I went out for a lot of mid-week practice days the previous year and Ted would often come out with me. We got very close in the couple of years we knew each other. After he passed Dulcie said to me, “Ted saw you like a son and I know he’d love you to have the bike”. I was so surprised but it was very touching to hear.

Barry
Oh fabulous, is Mrs S still around?

Matt
Yes, but she lives in a nursing home now, I think she has Alzheimer’s quite bad.

Barry
About 2002 was last time I spoke to her but time gets away as we know. I often think I’d like to catch up and show her how the bike looks now. Along with the repaint to my fairing, I did that little sticker where the rider’s name normally goes, “In memory of Ted”.

Matt
Yeah, I thought that was brilliant!

Barry
Thanks … yeah, meant a lot to a lot of people.

Matt
Yes, definitely!

Barry
You know, I look at us as being caretakers, we don’t own these things. We’re just the caretakers of them, we’re looking after them for now. Somebody else will continue looking after it later, but for the moment we’ve got the pleasure of looking after them. Our job is to maintain them and protect them as best we can and keep them for history. Actually, someone was telling me that the factory wanted to buy mine at some stage. I think Michael Coates might have told me. They never approached me, this was in the days that Ted still had it. The factory was trying to buy it back off him to put it in the museum.

If you do think of selling yours. Don’t promote it locally, promote it internationally. There’s people in Holland and people in Japan who would pay good money for it, they wouldn’t insult you. That’s what I’ve always thought with mine but it won’t be mine to sell, it will be my son’s, if he ever sells it but that won’t be happening in a hurry, that’s for sure. He’s always on to me to finish the engine so he can ride it again. We’ll get some more photos over to you of the rebuild and new paint.

Matt
That will be fantastic. Any photos or history you have that you are willing for me to put on the upcoming webpage will be great.

Barry
Well I’ll sit down and put something together, whatever history I can, I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time so it’s probably the push I need. I’ll make everything as clear as I can and send you an email. Send us that Facebook link and I’ll get Ben to pull it up and we’ll have a stickybeak.