Simon Pavey

This entry is part 14 of 22 in the series Adventure Rider Issue #2

At 46, Simon Pavey has a worldwide reputation as both a rider and instructor. He’s also a nice bloke with a glowing passion for riding and a ready chuckle. With his tenth Dakar on the horizon, the cheerful, likable Australian, based in Wales, was happy to share some of his considerable experience with AdvRider Mag readers.

Adv: We’ve all seen Ewan and Charley and Race To Dakar. For a lot of our readers, that will be what brought you to their attention. Do you have some star power now? Are you treated as a celebrity when you travel because of appearing in those shows?
SP: If only (laughing)! No, tragically, not.It’s definitely helped me with everything and raised my profile. I think it’s raised the profile of the whole motorcycle industry, especially here in the UK, Australia and Canada.

I’ve definitely seen it a little bit. I did an overland adventure rally in Canada just before I came out to Australia in August, and I kind of went there as the ‘personality’. I was pleasantly surprised. People definitely know about adventure riding now, and they do love it. It’s really nice when people tell me they’ve been inspired to get out there and do something in life, whether it’s around bikes or whatever, because they’ve seen those TV shows.

That’s the whole reason I started the off-road school back in 2000. My passion’s obviously always been bikes, especially off-road, but I love being able to get new people into our sport and get people interested in doing things. I’ve been lucky to be part of that whole ride.

Adv: Give us a brief history. You rode a lot of rallies on XRs in the 1980s?
SP: I started out when I was in high school. A mate had a little minibike-thing with a lawnmower engine in it. I had a go on it and I was hooked on motorcycle riding straight away.

I messed around out in Kurnell, NSW, for a few years, and then joined a minibike club. After that came some club racing and a bit of motocross when I was 16. I always wanted to do enduros, mainly because of Geoff Eldridge and Australasian Dirt Bike magazine.

At the time it was the only magazine we Australians had, and he was writing about all these multi-day enduro rides. That was a big thing for me. I just wanted to ride for a long, long time, and that’s what excited me about enduros back in those days. The whole thing was an epic every weekend. You had to drive to somewhere else in Australia and then do an event that went somewhere… the whole thing was a big adventure.

That led on to rallies for me. Over time enduros have become more mutlilap rides, halfway back to motocross. I still love that kind of racing, but when I did my first rally, again following Eldridge, it was in New Caledonia in 1988. I’d done Finke and the Weipa Croc Run and then he said there was a rally in New Caledonia. I was a kid and it was like, “What! Overseas? Wow!” It was a massive thing to get on a plane and go race in such an exotic place.

It was a five-day event and I had the roadbook on the handlebars and a bit bigger fuel tank, and it was all around the island of New Caledonia.

That was what made me start looking at rallies. I’m obviously lucky I’ve become a reasonably competent rider, but I’ve never made it to that next level with the Cyril Despres and the Marc Comas. I did get myself into a position where I did that first Dakar in 1998, and now it’s nine Dakars later.

Adv: Finishing a Dakar must feel special.
SP: Sometimes the beautiful thing about Dakar is the amazing adventures that follow on from it.

Because of going to Dakar I did the Trans-oriental Rally, which was St Petersburgh in Russia to Beijing, China. It was an amazing event and the most incredible thing I’ve ever done.

The organisation of Dakar is really slick now. You always know where the fuel’s going to be and where you’re going to eat and where the water is and everything else. It’s still a big adventure of course, but the Transoriental is new, and when we got to St Petersburgh the organisers didn’t know what was going on. We had to work everything out for ourselves. A couple of times we got to where the bivouac was supposed to be and it wasn’t even there. One day in particular we’d already ridden 1000km and we arrived to find no bivouac.

We had to find food, fuel and water, and the nearest town was 100km in another direction. We had to go another 200km that day to get what we needed to go racing again the next day.

I still love all that. Whether it’s going to do a local event down the road here, or crossing a continent.

Adv: Your ‘day job’ is to run offroad schools, right? Last time we spoke you were racing BMWs and instructing for BMW. Lately we’ve seen you on a Husqvarna. Is that because of the relationship between BMW and Husqvarna?
SP: It made it easy to go down that route, I suppose.

We started the school in 2000 with BMW and we’re still with BMW to this day. It’s a fantastic company to be involved with, especially because of the way the adventure market’s grown. At the moment I believe BMW still has the best product in that world. It’s all getting a bit more interesting and competitive now, for sure, but BMW is still in front, I think. It was a great thing for us when BMW decided to go into the dirt-bike market in 2008 and came out with the G450. That was pretty exciting. Customers come to the off-road school because maybe they’ve heard that doing a bit of off-roading will help their road riding. But after two days here they get a bit more of a taste for off road, and they suddenly think, “Ooo… actually it’s not just a gravel road. That track over there, or up over that grassy mountain. That looks pretty cool as well, and I can go there now.”

They’ve got this new skill set and it’s not as scary or as difficult as they thought.

We had our normal GS fleet for our adventure-bike schools, but we also had a program with enduro bikes that we just called Level Enduros, and we used Husqvarnas for that.

Sometimes you can learn stuff on a small bike that’s hard to learn on a big bike, but once you’ve learned it you can put it back into your big-bike riding. It’s scary to try and do a spinturn on a 250kg bike, but once you know the feeling on a smaller bike it’s not so difficult.It does help your big-bike riding, for sure.

Adv: What about the future? Are there more Dakars to come? Is the BMWHusqvarna breakup going to change things?
SP: It was a really strange situation when BMW owned Husqvarna. Husky was run reasonably independently. We had to go to Husqvarna separately and negotiate a contract for both the school and racing.

We did a deal with Husqvarna to go to Dakar. It was effectively a twoyear deal, so we theoretically have one more year to run. It’s the same with the contract for the offroad school. But now BMW has sold Husqvarna and things have changed quite dramatically.

I hope we’ll still work with the brand. Husqvarna’s got such a history, and they were so happy with us after Dakar. It was unreal. Then a week later they said, “Well, even though we’re happy, we’re all out of a job. You’re on your own.”

Adv: When are you coming back to Australia?
SP: I think it worked really well between us and Compass Expeditions. They’ve got a good set-up there. We’ve just got to work out the when and where, but we’ll definitely do something together again in 2014.

Compass has bikes, so we had a beautiful mixture of people who came on their own bikes and those on Compass bikes.

I think the basic concept of running an off-road school, and then a trip around some great parts of Australia with some off-road built into the trip, was a formula that was really good fun for everyone. We had brilliant feedback from the customers and we loved it as well. That’s important.

Adv: How did it come about that you ended up settling in Wales?
SP: Everyone always asks me that! It’s simple, really. We very quickly forget, because of modern comms and inexpensive air travel and all that, how cheap and easy it is to find out about, and travel, the world these days.

In the 1980s I was excited about riding the different events and iconic races I’d heard about. In Australia at that time there was very little international information available. We didn’t have the Internet or anything like that. You maybe knew someone or had spoken to someone who’d been to Europe once before. Like a lot of young Aussies did, and still do, I had to decide whether to pursue a career riding in either America or Europe. If you wanted to see the world as a rider, you pretty much had to base yourself in one or the other.

I did a short stint racing in Japan in 1989. After that I wanted to do some events in Europe and see what it was all about. My wife and I came to England because we knew another Aussie enduro rider who was living in London, so it was an easy landing point.

I did the Six Days and did the Atlas Rally in Morocco and my first Dakar, and then we had the idea for the offroad school. We looked at probably six different venues all around the UK before we stumbled across this place here in Wales. If you took a blank

sheet of paper and drew an ideal training venue, it would look like this place. It’s over 1600 hectares and has everything we need and every degree of difficulty. We’ve got 80km of big, wide dirt roads within the property, and every other little piece of it is as hard or as easy as you want to make it. It’s also a really beautiful part of the world, there’s no question about it, and we’ve got fantastic motorcycling, on-road and off-road, right on our doorstep.

This year I was in South America in January for Dakar, and then in February I was in Morocco working for BMW. That kind of thing is just easy to do from here.

There’s definitely bits of Australia I miss, but I also recognise it’s a little bit harder to do what I like doing if I’m living back there.

Adv: After all your experience and all the great things you’ve done, tell us something we can take with us as good advice. Give us some words of wisdom from Simon Pavey.
SP: (Laughing hard). Words of wisdom? You said one right at the start: don’t go into the motorcycle industry thinking it’s going to get you to ride more!

I think the biggest thing is to follow your dream.

I know it’s a clichéd thing, but be passionate. Follow your dream and believe. Sometimes it takes years.

What I’ve done might sound simple, but it took me 20 years of always thinking about Dakar to get to the start line. That was 15 years ago, and I haven’t stopped dreaming.

You’ve gotta believe in your dreams and chase them down.

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