“He was one of those guys that every now and then you'd say, 'Don't change anything on the bike, I'll just ride it.'” By then we had data.
“We saw the most incredible braking temperatures from him and when he came in we saw that he hit the brakes so hard that the suspension bottomed out and he just held on to it. So we said we could put stronger springs there or more oil – “Nah buddy, don't change anything.”
“If he had been able to commit and show up fit and healthy with the right concentration every weekend, he absolutely would have been something.
“I always knew it would be an interesting relationship. I hadn't met him yet [team manager] Garry Taylor and [Suzuki race boss] Mistuo Itoh went to Australia to sign him. On the way to signing the contract, he wrote off his brand new $250,000 Porsche by running a red light and that didn't faze him in the least.”
Shenton first met Gobert after the season-ending 1996 Australian GP at Eastern Creek.
“We were packing up and a scruffy brat was hanging out in the back of the garage with a few buddies in tow. Then one of them says to me: “Hello Stuart, I'm your new driver, I hope you're damn ready for me!” And that was Anthony Gobert.
“At our first test with him at Eastern Creek, we did his first debriefing while all the Japanese engineers sat there with pens floating, waiting to take notes and get his first impression of the bike. And he says, “Well, I need two things: I need a cage in the back of the garage with a dancer in it, and we need to put some beers in the fridge.”
Gobert at the 1997 Italian GP
Mike Cooper/Allsport
“Then he gets up and goes out. Six Japanese engineers sat at the table, not knowing what to do, what to say, or what had just happened. With his talent he should have become world champion, but that would never have worked out.”
Gobert's career was characterized by stories about boisterous guys, which seemed mostly like fun at the time, but his love of the high life was already taking over.
“Gobert showed up with a bag full of someone else’s urine, Withnail and I styled”
Five-time GP winner Garry McCoy was friends with Goey when they raced 250cc production bikes in Australia, and even then he was a wild child.
“It was always a little difficult to hold on to Goey's rope,” McCoy remembers.
When Gobert came to Suzuki, the team obviously wanted to clean him up. During pre-season testing in 1997, the Lucky Strike-backed team had him tested for marijuana. Gobert showed up for the test hiding a Ziploc bag full of someone else's urine, according to Withnail and I. When his urine was tested, he failed the test.
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