Farewell Phillip Island, you’ve been great!

I’ll never forget the first Australian Grand Prix at Phillip Island. It was round two of the 1989 MotoGP championship, following the season opener at Suzuka, Japan, where Kevin Schwantz had got his second world campaign underway by beating arch-rival Wayne Rainey by a fraction of a second.

Tokyo to Sydney, a few days of R&R&R (rest, relaxation and refreshment), then we flew to Melbourne, got a hire car and headed to Phillip Island.

The two-hour drive through Victoria was remarkable – pretty much the entire 200 miles were decorated by flags and posters, all shouting support for Australia’s first MotoGP king Wayne Gardner, who had won the 1987 title and was aiming to retake it in 1989.

We had never seen anything like it, not even in Spain, which had recently started down the long road to becoming motorcycle racing’s global powerhouse. It really felt like something was happening, like motorcycle racing was finally breaking through to the mainstream. It was a mirage, of course.

Gardner’s fairytale victory was as real as it gets. The so-called Wollongong Wild One won a typical Phillip Island dogfight; the home hero chased past the chequered flag by Rainey and Christian Sarron, the trio separated by less than half a second.

Phillip Island features three times in MotoGP’s list of all-time top-10 closest finishes

Reigning champion Eddie Lawson – who had defected from Yamaha to Honda for 1989 – came in fifth, battered by a high-speed practice crash that had onlookers writing off his chances of retaining the title with Honda’s evil ’89 NSR500. Five months later Lawson won his fourth and most remarkable championship.

Forty-seven seconds behind Gardner was a young rookie called Mick Doohan.

Like all great racetracks, Phillip Island follows the lay of the land.

The downhill start/finish takes aim at the Bass Straight – next stop Tasmania – then swerves right and left, running along the clifftops of Cunningham Bay, before turning left again at Stoner Corner and heading inland.

That’s why the circuit rises and falls, because this is hilly, coastal country. Its highest point is Lukey Heights, approached uphill through the heart-in-your-mouth Hayshed right-hander.

The circuit was built in the 1950s but struggled to stay in business because the asphalt kept falling apart. Why? Because the road bridge connecting the island to the mainland wasn’t strong enough to carry the heavy equipment needed to surface the track with a hot-mix asphalt, so the owners had to use a cold mix, which fell apart too easily.

In the 1980s, a new bridge was built, allowing up-to-date construction equipment onto the island. In 1988, the track was fully refurbished by engineer Bob Barnard, making way for the 1989 Grand Prix.

Now, almost 40 years after its inaugural MotoGP event, Phillip Island is the only circuit that features three times in MotoGP’s list of all-time top-10 closest finishes. That tells us a lot about the seaside venue’s layout.

The closest podium finish of all time, plus the third and ninth closest, all happened at Phillip Island because the circuit’s fast, flowing nature allows riders to get close and stay closer than any other track that’s featured in MotoGP, all the way back to the championship’s opening 1949 season.

Most modern racetracks are stop-and-go in nature, with shortish corners, where riders make most of their time in the entry and exit phases, where there’s little opportunity to stay closer to each other. For these reasons, stop-and-go layouts tend to break up groups of riders, rather than give them the chance to stay together.

At Phillip Island, a rider chasing a rival through the circuit’s numerous sweeping corners – Doohan, Southern Loop, Stoner, Siberia, Hayshed, Lukey Heights and the final super-fast double left – can adjust body position, lean angle, corner speed, throttle opening and his racing line, so he can stay right on the rear tyre of whoever’s in front, while also seeking to set up a pass into the next corner. Of course, the rider behind this rider can do the same to him and so on.

Phillip Island is unique because no other circuit has so many fast, sweeping corners that allow riders to fight like that. And that’s why you get so many breathtakingly close battles there.

When MotoGP leaves Phillip Island this coming Sunday evening, it will be the end of all that. If you want to see PI-style racing, you will have to go to motogp.com or YouTube. It’s over. Done. Finished.

The tightest podium of all time happened at the 1999 Australian GP, when winner Tady Okada, Max Biaggi and Regis Laconi were covered by 0.124 seconds, or about eight metres at around 160mph.

And this was way before today’s performance-parity technical regulations written to make all motorcycles perform similarly – spec tyres, spec electronics and strict rules on engine configuration. 

The third closest happened at Phillip Island in 2022, when Alex Rins, Marc Márquez and Pecco Bagnaia were covered by 0.224 seconds.

The ninth closest came in 2000, when Biaggi, Loris Capirossi and Valentino Rossi crossed the line separated by 0.288 seconds.

Probably no need to tell you that Valencia, Misano and Balaton Park do not feature in MotoGP’s top-ten closest podium finishes. They are all tight, stop-start layouts, which don’t allow packs of riders to share the same few square metres of racetrack.

And I very much doubt that Adelaide – the inner-city venue that’s supposed to replace Phillip Island as Australian GP host from next year – will feature in the list either.

Of course, Phillip Island isn’t the first epic circuit to be lost by MotoGP. During my time covering the championship, we’ve lost Spa-Francorchamps, Salzburgring, Hockenheim, Suzuka and others.

All of these racetracks – quite rightly – were deemed too dangerous for MotoGP. But they had such a special taste when things went right – shivers down the spine every time

A few of us used to scramble up the steep hillside behind the Salzburgring paddock and pits – so steep you needed hands and feet – to hang over the guardrail and watch Rainey, Lawson, Doohan and Kevin Schwantz rocket past at maybe 180mph, just a few feet away because there was zero run-off. Grassy cliff face on the other size of the track, guardrail on our side. Hideously dangerous, and yet wondrous.

“The Salzburgring had my all-time favourite corner – where you came over the top of the hill overlooking the pits,” remembers Doohan. “I know it was dangerous but to me it was everything racing is about.

“You’re in sixth gear at over 300 kays (190mph). The bike is just about revving out and it doesn’t want to turn left or right. You flick it left and you run past the grass bank really fast.

“As you go through the left you’re over the brow of the hill and the track starts to fall away and there’s a little dip in the road there too. The bike also unloads the suspension as you go from one angle of lean to the other. The steering suddenly goes light and the back end breaks away – the whole bike is loose. It’s breaking loose and sliding at close to top speed, then while that’s happening you knock it down two gears for the next right.

“To me, riding a bike like that at those speeds is why I liked racing.”

Phillip Island isn’t quite Salzburgring, but its sustained high speeds make it closer than anywhere else.

Unlike Salzburgring, Suzuka and the rest, the Victorian venue isn’t being removed from MotoGP for safety reasons; it’s being removed for commercial reasons.