When the lead pack came around on the first lap at Pukekohe Park Raceway on Saturday, December 29, 1973, no one could believe Cal Rayborn was right in the thick of it. After all, he was aboard a Suzuki TR500 twin while the others were on three-cylinder 750s-Ginger Molloy on a Kawasaki H2R, and Ron Grant and Pat Hennen on Suzuki TR750s. But there was Cal, tucked into a ball atop the shrieking Suzuki as the riders began the second round of the $10,000 Marlboro International Series-the most important championship ever held in New Zealand. A magician at overcoming the deficiencies of slower equipment, Rayborn had twice won the Daytona 200 on a Harley-Davidson KR750 flathead and then showed the British the way home in the Trans-Atlantic Match Races aboard an iron-head XR750. And now he was trying to do that here.
The aggressiveness Rayborn brought to the track contradicted his otherwise easygoing demeanor, but those who saw him ride never doubted the fire. It was this fire that brought him to grassy Pukekohe Valley, staring into the innards of a hastily rebuilt Suzuki racing engine.
"Everybody was running alcohol," recalls American racer Ralph Hudson. Alcohol provided more horsepower, was perfectly legal for racing Down Under, and Rayborn's team, eager to win, was taking advantage of this.
"'Dope' is no more dangerous than race gas," explains Molloy. "What is dangerous is the uneducated mechanic who, in his enthusiasm for converting a gas engine, doesn't have the necessary skills to do so. As a consequence, there is always the likelihood of an imminent seizure should he get it wrong." Indeed, Rayborn's bike was having trouble. A piston seizure required the top end to be replaced before the main event.
Turn One at Pukekohe is a long, fast, flat, hold-your-breath right-hander bordered by a meager grass strip and a guardrail. Champion Curve was known as the fastest corner in all of Australasia, and even today remains a breathtaking proposition. Rayborn never made two laps. Partway around the corner his engine seized again and the bike skidded off-course, its rider slamming into the guardrail and then bouncing back onto the track.
"The race was about 20 laps with a push start," Molloy explains. "They dropped the flag and I was leading, though I never looked behind me because I had a broken neck from a coal-mine accident. I came down the front straight at the end of the second lap and they shoved the red flag out-he'd crashed the lap before. I immediately sat up and braked. His body was on the outside of the track, 6 or 8 feet out. There were no haybales. He had been there for a minute and 20 seconds. At that point I went into the pits-I knew it was Cal.'"
Murray Perry, a friend of Molloy's, had walked to Turn 1 for the main event. "Just before the race started, I went and sat at that end of the grandstand to watch," he recalls. "They took off and away they went. And when they came down, I can remember being amazed Cal was right up there in the bunch. I was thinking, 'Man!' And before I could even think about it, there was this huge impact. It was an indelible memory. I've always felt that [the bike] seized and high-sided him to the left into the Armco at probably the most critical point of the track, because he was neither upright nor laid into the corner."
It has been a source of intense sorrow to New Zealanders that one of the world's best roadracers died at their track on that vibrant summer day. For Americans, the question has always been why was Rayborn there in the first place? The haunting press statement claiming he'd died in a meaningless race at some irrelevant track was painful. It was also flat wrong. The event was one of the biggest races of the year in the southern hemisphere, and Pukekohe was New Zealand's premier motor-racing circuit.