Back in January, legendary Australian road racer Anthony Gobert passed away of unspecified health issues, age 48. Images of Gobert prior to his passing hinted at just how hard his post racing career has been since he finally ran out of competition options in 2008. After a wide range of legal problems, Gobert’s addiction issues got the better of him, and the company that troubled people keep likely hastened his passing.
In Canada, racers of a certain age were immediately reminded of Art “the dart” Robbins, who died back in 2020, age 59. The parallels to Gobert’s troubles are remarkable, and underlined the fact that people with limited knowledge of the realities of addiction are not much help to those struggling with real issues.
I met Gobert in the fall if 1994, at the then-traditional big December AMA tire test at Daytona International Speedway. At the time I was writing for a long-defunct Australian magazine, and one of the benefits was a subscription to that bi-weekly mag.
So, I knew of the young Gobert’s remarkable motocross career, and his rapid climb through the road racing ranks, going from 250 cc production rookie to Pro Superbike winner with the works Honda team in less than two years. Gobert then gambled to leverage his national success down under with a risky jump from Honda protégé to works Kawasaki racer with the Muzzy Superbike team.
At his home event at Philip Island at the end of the 1994 season, Gobert earned pole in his Ninja debut, then supported team leader Scott Russell in the opener, netting a third and podium in his World debut. In the next race, he took victory and celebrated by stripping down and throwing all his brand-new gear into the partisan crowd!
So, a few weeks later in Daytona, I was one of the few on hand who had some knowledge of Gobert’s recent, incredible performances. Gobert was a charming, outgoing and fun interview, and was awed by the scale of the Daytona Super Speedway venue – and it’s December emptiness.
I explained that things would be different in March and highlighted that the inside of the front straight tri-oval would contain the supercross track in a few months time. This energized former MX ace Gobert, who said he would call Kawasaki and make sure that he had a bike to ride for the “other” AMA National round in three months’ time!
I explained that Kawasaki would probably prefer he concentrate on his day job, and that others were contracted to represent the “mean green” in Supercross. This proved to be true, but Gobert was defiantly disappointed.
My next clear memory of Gobert was in Las Vegas during the AMA National weekend in 1997, when he had returned from a stint leading the Lucky Strike Suzuki Grand Prix squad, a promising effort that ended due to failed drug tests.
I was walking through the lobby of one of the big downtown Casino/hotels, heading to a Conference room for a rules meeting. Gobert was cruising through the lobby, bright red Ducati Dainese leathers draped over his shoulder, looking like a kid in a candy store. I wondered about the many ways his evening might be different from mine!
My last specific recollection of Gobert is leaving the Media Room at Daytona in the early evening, heading for the rental car with Inside Motorcycles Editor John Hopkins. At the time, the CSBK series was broadcast in the US on Speedvision, and Gobert had watched our racing, and wanted to know more.
His specific area of interest was the hilly and challenging Atlantic Motorsport Park in Nova Scotia. Often considered intimidating and hard to learn, even by the absolute best, it had grabbed the “Go Show’s” attention, in a good way.
“I reckon that would be good fun,” considered Gobert, who never did make it to Shubenacadie. “It looks like road racing on a motocross track.”
Robbins might not have had the charm of Gobert, but those who collaborated with him did warm to his personality. Deaf in one ear, Robbins tended to mumble out one side of his mouth, and that made his sometimes hard to understand, certainly at a noisy track.
For both Robbins and Gobert, good people stuck their necks out to help them stay on the straight and narrow, with almost completely failed results. In both cases, leisure time was the enemy, due to the kind of people you wind up with in the middle of the night when the “straights” have gone home to bed.
Interestingly, both riders struggled to meet the public relations demands of major tobacco manufacturers. At issue was the need to look squeaky clean when the product you were promoting was in the news daily as a health risk.
Gobert’s drug test failures when riding for Lucky Strike were not part of an event’s officially required monitoring, but private in nature for the knowledge of the sponsor – even though the details were made public. Also in question was the fact that the tests focused on cannabis and THC, by far the easiest compound to check for and the one that persists in the body for the longest period.
For Rothmans and Honda Canada, the concern was that Robbins would get into trouble with the law, as many of social group already had. If a news source searched his name from a police report and pulled an image of Art in his team gear, it wouldn’t be the promotion recognition that these big companies craved!
As well, Robbins wasn’t easily groomed, even if you took the time and spent the money to provide the required knowledge and media training. Images of him at the hotel media conference (remember those?) for the first Motoplan/Castrol National CSBK round of the 1986 season at Westwood, BC, wearing an American Camel Pro Series event t-shirt was just the beginning of a free fall from title favourite to missing in action.
When the Rothmans Honda deal came apart at the end of that season, it wasn’t all on Robbins – there had been way too many technical issues with the VFR750 Interceptors built in California at great expense for Robbins and popular teammate Paul MacMillan.
Replacing this program was the subject of considerable competition, and eventually Rueben McMurter left Yamaha and took over. “The Rueb” won the title for both sponsors in his first attempt for a marketing effort that ran world-wide at the time.
Robbins then jumped to a privateer Suzuki team for wealthy businessperson Frank Ciampini. That barely lasted through the opening National round of 1987 at Sanair, Quebec, and that was the last most race fans saw or heard of Robbins.
From there, most of the sightings and reports regarding Robbins were at best worrisome, in a similar manner to the details of Gobert’s troubled existence in resort towns on the east coast of Australia. In the end, the early deaths of these two flamboyant racers were not a shock, but both racers were popular and in similar ways deserve to be remembered.
- From Colin Fraser
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