DOMESTIC BLISS!
“MAGEE WENT FROM A RAW KIT ON A DIRT BIKE, TO HANDING THE STARS THEIR OWN BACKSIDES WHILE RACING MACHINES WHICH WERE FAR FROM FACTORY. KEVIN WAS GOING PLACES!”
“There was a poster on the wall in the smoko (lunch) room at the bike shop I worked at during my apprenticeship,” says Kevin Magee. “It was a picture of Kenny Roberts on the black and yellowYamaha. I don’t reckon I ever walked past that poster without stopping to look at it. I was always checking out the tacho to try and work out how fast he was going. I was dreaming. But I knew that’s where I wanted to be…”
Kevin Magee was just an ordinary teenager who loved motorbikes, a dreamer from a small town, but one with plenty of guts and determination – nobody was ever going to stop the kid from Horsham in Western Victoria…
One of five boys and three girls in a family of 10, Magee spent his early years chasing his older brothers around the family property. A bit of a late starter in today’s motorcycling terms, Magee – like Daryl Beattie and Wayne Gardner – didn’t start mucking around with powered two-wheelers until aged 10 when he acquired a Honda Dax minibike; playing around with motors started earlier when brother Damien (with Kevin’s help) stuck a two-stroke Villiers engine into a wheelbarrow… Only in Australia! The Dax came from dad courtesy of the brothers’ interest in engines and wheels.
Soon, Magee’s other brother, Tim purchased a Honda CB125S road bike and things became competitive. Kevin grins: “Back then we even had a watch – one with an
