Since his retirement from professional competition, Australia’s own three-time World Superbike Champion Troy Bayliss has maintained an active involvement within the racing and general motorcycling industry.

In the past six months, Bayliss has branched out to start his own company, Troy Bayliss Events, which has already run a professional cycling race and the popular Troy Bayliss Classic flat track event.

Recently he announced his further expanding the scope of events, introducing the new Moto Expo Brisbane and Moto Expo Melbourne to the market.

We caught up with Troy to find out a little bit more about his latest venture.

Troy Bayliss has maintained an active involvement in the two-wheel industry since his retirement.

Troy, congratulations on announcing the new Moto Expo event. Can you tell us why you decided to take on such a project?

It is a new thing. My life is bikes, you could say. I’ve been around a lot of shows across the world during those years, and also have been involved in a number of roles and product launches. I’ve been doing different things over the last few years since I stopped racing, and decided to come up with the Troy Bayliss Classic in January.

I worked on the Classic with the Taree Motorcycle Club and had some help from Mark Petersen with the Marketing. Basically the event went very well, and after that it just sort of came up. We were talking about the shows, and I just decided I could give it a go, and do things a little bit differently. He’s been around the game a long time and I thought we could table our ideas and when we put them all together we decided to give it a shot.

What will make Moto Expo different from the current established events?

I love going to the shows, and I love seeing all the new bikes and brands. The number one focus will always be on the bikes, and the exhibitors that come from all across the industry. But I think through the shows I’ve seen, including those overseas, there is a new approach which we need to take in Australia instead of it just being about tyre-kicking static events, we want to get people excited at the shows and give them a full day experience.

The focus will always be on the new and shiny bikes and products but we want to create an event that will hold people throughout the day. And create things like come and try areas for kids, manufacturer demonstrations and rides and demonstrations on a larger scale.

We also want to put on events within the expo, and these venues will allow us to do that. Both venues, the RNA Showgrounds and Melbourne Showgrounds, are great, and are big enough to let us do these things. Both venues have just been fully renovated, so we’ll be able to take advantage of that. We have also just announced free onsite motorcycle parking in both Brisbane and Melbourne, we have great flexibility at both these venues.

The Troy Bayliss Classic in Taree was heralded a success.

One of the initial events you’ve announced is the Baylisstic Scramble. Sounds like a lot of fun, can you tell us more about this or who could possibly take part?

Yeah, we’ve already got a lot of guys interested in doing this, and I could do it as well. We’re planning on putting on a bit of a teams event and will have maybe five or six teams taking part to create an entertaining show of around two hours. That will likely be on the Saturday night, and will be open to people attending. Throughout the day we’ll be practicing for the event and there will be lots to see on that front too.

The exciting thing is there’s plenty of scope to do this. We’re really looking forward to locking down a few more details and of course letting everyone know who will be taking part shortly.

It looks like you already have a good spread of brands confirming their involvement, that surely is a good sign for the event?

It’s looking good already. Now that we’ve put it out there I’m hoping we can increase that level of support. I’ve put my name out there and said I’m giving this a go. I’m certainly going to do the best job I can to make this work.

We have only just released sites and have had great support from the industry. Over 50 percent of the show is already sold out, so it should be a great event for the industry and the visitors. We’ve got more to announce in the coming months, too.

Thanks for the chat Troy.

No problem, thanks for getting in touch.