Racers One FMX crash too many put ‘Mad’ Mike on the road to fame; now he’s proudly racing alongside his teenage son.

‘Mad’ Mike Whiddett has always loved motorsport on the ragged edge. If anyone embodies the term ‘adrenalin junkie’ it’s this guy. A mad keen motocross rider from his early years, he aspired to ride freestyle motocross (FMX) and was recruited for the Crusty Demons tours.

Everyone who rides FMX knows that crashes and broken bones come with the territory. But it took one crash off his motocross bike during the 2002 X-Air games in Auckland to convince Whiddett four-wheels might be good. 

That catastrophic crash that saw him rushed to hospital with four smashed vertebrae. Doctors told him he would be paralysed, but the next day he felt faint tingling in his toes and feet – it was the start of a recovery he calls a ‘miracle’, one that tested his resilience and steered him toward a career in competitive drifting that started in 2007.

Since then, Whiddett has done more than any other driver to popularise the sport of drifting, and in the process he has garnered an online audience numbering in the millions.

Fast forward a few years to early 2021 and Whiddett (40) is in danger again – but it’s a kind of danger he enjoys. This time he is at risk of being upstaged – overtaken perhaps – by the next generation of fast Whiddetts: his teenage son Lincoln (Linc for short).

Having helped mentor Linc in off-road racing’s youth Kiwitruck race classes, the fast family contested the inaugural stadium off-road racing championship in Manukau.

The father and son pairing were the sensation of the event, Linc taking his class and surprising many off-road racing regulars in the all-in races the closed out the two-event series.

Mike Whiddett found himself wheel to wheel with the best in the sport. His ride? A tiny American race truck with a Mazda ‘REPU’ ute body and a fairly raucous rotary engine.

There were rumblings up and down pit lane. Racers were divided over whether the wee ute should run in Thundertrucks – up against massive V8 utes – or in the top off-road race car class, where he would run against massive V8 race cars.

The sport has been trying to find a way for the Whiddett truck to race against other trucks for almost two years. Whiddett doesn’t really seem to care – he just wants to go racing. After all the FMX Crusty Demon events, all the X-Air flights, all the drifting here and overseas, the televised sideways runs up over the Crown Range near Queenstown, off-road racing is his new firm favourite.

“It’s great racing and the stadium track is superb.”

So what’s the truck?

The original Mazda REPU (Rotary Engined Pickup) was the world’s first and only Wankel-engined pickup truck. It was sold from 1974 to 1977 in the North American market and exported to Canada. All-up, 15,000 were built. There are a couple of road-going REPU utes owned by passionate collectors here in New Zealand.

But Mad Mike’s is special and it fits in an increasingly crowded Whiddett stable of wildly modified vehicles.

“There’s always another build. I’ve always got about six projects in my mind at any one time!” 

The Mad Mike collection is growing rapidly and each vehicle’s name is a play on ‘Bul’ in recognition of his long-standing links with the Red Bull energy drink brand: 

• Madbul 7.3 – a Mazda RX-7 with a retro Mazda RX-3 front end.

• Badbul – a Mazda RX-8.

• Humbul – another Mazda RX-7.

• Radbul – a Mazda MX-5.

And now, there’s the off-road race truck, based (visually) on a Mazda REPU B2000 pickup truck and running a highly tuned but apparently unburstable Mazda Renesis 13B rotary engine. The gearbox is a Mendeola MD4S transaxle.

It has a full steel tube-frame, is clad in fibre-reinforced plastic bodywork and weighs just 900kg. The suspension features a full race array of Fox Racing Triple Bypass shock absorbers.

This latest new machine has been christened Rumbul. 

“It’s not an absolute crazy monster – it’s got about 250bhp. But the power-to-weight ratio and the balance are just unreal – you can literally just drive the thing like a 250cc motocross bike. It’s exciting to drive.”