Triumph XC800 Tiger Across Australia

This entry is part 12 of 26 in the series Adventure Rider Issue #4

Is there anyone who hasn’t dreamed of riding across Australia? Here’s someone who’s doing it. Again. And this time on a Tiger 800.

Christian Loghem and Stuart Ball are dedicated blokes. In 2011 Stuart decided to raise money for the Royal Children’s Hospital in Queensland. He got some donations together, jumped on his 990 and rode from Byron Bay, NSW, to Steep Point, WA. At the end of it, he handed just over $5000 to the hospital. The Great Australian Ride (GAR) had had its start.

The ride’s been growing ever since.

So have the size of the donations. Christian Loghem, 42, a Food Safety Auditor during the day, joined the team. After barrelling across the country in 2012 and 2013 on his DR650, he’s taken a big step for 2014 and set up a new Triumph Tiger XC for the crossing.

With a couple of GARs behind him already, we were busting to see what a rider who knew what he was up against would do to set up the 800.

AdvRider Mag downed a few very strong coffees at the Byron lighthouse, the starting point for the GAR, while Christian talked us through it.

Good to go

The bog-stock Tiger is a great package to start with, and the mods and accessories Christian’s fitted so far are aimed at protecting the bike and carrying luggage.

Christian has opted for a stack of OEM Triumph accessories, like a headlight protector, spotties, bashplate, centrestand, and Arrow exhaust. Before the crossing he’ll fit a longer Triumph chainguard, and although the bike was supplied with Triumph hard panniers and pannier racks, he’s not expecting to use that rig on the crossing itself, so there’s a pair of Wolfman racks in place now.

Aftermarket

Running down the protection gear, the Great Australian Ride Trumpy now sports VPS handguards and SW Motech crash bars. Along with the OEM clobber, that means the bike is pretty well armoured up and safe from any major damage from minor mishaps.

Pivot Pegz do the bizzo for the tough times standing up, and an Oxford tank bag doubles up with the Wolfman Expedition panniers to handle the luggage requirements.

Christian is big on media and promoting the GAR, and he likes to provide lots of material to keen supporters, so he has the bike rigged with GoPro mounts facing forward, backward and even underneath. There’s a remote activator on the ’bars so he can control the recording on the fly.

The Great Australian Ride

The more we spoke to Christian, the more we wanted to know about The Great Australian Ride. Fortunately, Stuart Ball, 40, a chippy by trade, is the guy who started it all, and he was there when we were crawling all over the Triumph.

We asked the guys to fill us in.

“The ride started in August 2011,” recalled Stuart.

“The idea was just to raise a bit of money for the Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation after they’d helped my daughter. I raised $5200 and rode across, and that was a successful trip.

“I could see the power of duplication with donations, so I introduced more riders and shared the experience of the outback.

“Then I met Christian and we developed Team GAR to support SIDS And Kids.”

“We used to follow each other on Facebook,” explained Christian, “and it turned out we only lived the next suburb over from each other. I showed up at Stuart’s with a six-pack. We had a chat, he showed me the map, and I said I was in.

“I wasn’t going to let him have all that fun on his own.”

That was 16 weeks before the 2012 ride. After a mountain of hard work by both blokes, 12 riders tackled the GAR that year and $26,275 landed with the SIDS And Kids folks. The following year another $34,520 went their way, and now the 2014 GAR is well under way and Christian and Stuart are working harder than ever.

“From 2012 to 2013 was, like, ‘Wow! What did we just do here!’” smiled Christian.

“We realised we’ve got something very special, and we used what we’d learned in 2012 and built on that.

“We’ve learned so much about recruiting riders and marketing. We’re novices. We’re not trained in any of this. We’ve got no idea about talking to media.”

“We just got stuck in,” mused Stuart.

“It’s been fantastic to be part of it,” continued Christian. “To share the common goal of raising awareness of SIDS, to raise the money for such a deserving cause, and to be part of something special has been phenomenal.”

You can be part of it too. Log on to:

www.thegreataustralianride.com for all the information, pics of the riders and past rides, background, details and history, and to get involved. It’s a great site, and it looks like a really brilliant ride.

The target for 2014 is $40,000.There couldn’t be a better way to ride across Australia.

’Bar man

The last of the set-up sites is the handlebars, and it’ll be no surprise there’s a bit going on there.

First up is the VPS BarkBusters, and then the Grip Puppies slip on over the standard Triumph grips. Christian says he fits Grip Puppies to all his bikes.

On RAM mounts across the ’bars themselves are the iPhone (so you can phone Christian when he’s late and he can tell you he forgot about NSW time being different to Queensland time), a Garmin Rhino 5 and a SPOT 2.

The Rhino has a trick feature which allows anyone with a Rhino to locate on a map anyone else with a Rhino who’s in range, so it lets Christian and Stuart keep tabs on each other. It also allows the sending of text messages.

It’s a neat and effective looking set-up.

POIs

Fuel is always the biggest thought in any adventure rider’s mind on a long trip, and for the Tiger, Safari Tanks has the answer. A very schmick-fitting 34-litre jobbie gives a big boost in capacity over the standard 19-litre stocker, and that should give a range of somewhere over 600km, even hard on the throttle.

For tyres Christian has sensibly decided to run Mitas E09s. The only problem there was the tyre profile was just a whisker too tall for comfort on the front, so the guard was raised about 10mm.

There’s a couple of fittings hard-wired to the battery. One is for the battery minder for when the bike’s garaged for long periods, and the other is for the compressor Christian will have on board.

Just as we were taking the final pics we noticed something odd: a stubby holder over the oil filter.

“I just put it there to protect the filter and keep it clean,” grinned Christian. “And if I pull up somewhere and someone gives me a beer, I can just whip it off.”

Stock option

With bike sitting in the crushing Byron humidity – we almost couldn’t get down our third cappuccino – and attracting plenty of attention from passers-by, we wanted to know a bit about why Christian had built the bike in the first place, and what he had in mind for the mechanical setting up for the trip.

“I haven’t done anything mechanically,” roared Christian, “and I’m assured by the Triumph guys I shouldn’t have to.

“And I don’t think I will. Not for the first ride. We haven’t had a Tiger do the ride yet, so I’ll just see how it goes.”