Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2025 i Classic Racer

ARCHIVE We wonder if this was the best $1000 that Stan Hailwood – dad of the legendary Mike Hailwood – had ever spent. The story goes that while getting ready for the 1964 United States Grand Prix at Daytona, Florida, in February 1964, a reporter bumped into Stan Hailwood in a hotel and told him of the world one-hour speed record around the legendary banked circuit. His interest piqued – the wealthy Hailwood Senior not only contacted Count Domenico Agusta, to get permission to use one of Mike’s spare MV 500cc works machines for the attempt, he also paid the $1000 to hire the track himself… Riding clockwise around the oval, Mike howled the four-cylinder MV Agusta around the circuit for the full hour, with father Stan standing by the…

WIN Nomad gloves will keep you riding through winter!They feature full grain leather, a textile construction and a waterproof Hipora membrane andThinsulate inner liner. Plus, a two-layer storm cuff closure system and touchscreen compatible fingers. Find out more at www.weiseclothing.com Across 1 & 4: The amount of space available for a machine to soak up both rider weight and surface undulation. (10,6)7: See 29 Across.10: Honda team started by Klaus, the only Austrian to win a Sidecar World Championship. (6)12: ___ Source, famously tight hairpin at Spa Francorchamps. (2)14: Tools, often said to be spun by race mechanics. (8)15: One of the fastest parts of the Isle of Man circuit, coming out of Bray Hill. (4,4)17: The immediate forerunner to 35 Across. (4)18: See 30 Across.20: European country that has…

TEST Just over 50 years ago now, 1974 saw a momentous transition in 500GP racing, marking the last time a four-stroke – meaning MV Agusta, courtesy of the late Phil Read – would ever win a World Championship title, until the 2002 advent of MotoGP. His erstwhile team-mate Giacomo Agostini’s shock switch to Yamaha and the two-stroke camp for that season would only yield Ago the 350cc world crown to start with – but in 1975 it would be mission accomplished for him, and Yamaha, in the more prestigious larger-capacity class, too. But 1974 also saw a landmark debut race victory for a Yamaha two-stroke in the Isle of Man Senior TT – then still a part of the 500cc Grand Prix race calendar – when Phil Carpenter on his…

PEOPLE With Oulton Park being our last meeting of 2024, our attentions turned to the 2025 season. The plan is for Adam Carson to race in the CRMC Supersport 600 Championship and when we can, the Superbike 750. Being Yamaha fans, I bought an old Yamaha FZR600R race bike from a bike breaker I know. He had been sitting on it for a couple of years and never got round to pulling it apart. For us this is the perfect base for a race bike. Only once we got it, we realised it was a pretty good race bike already as it had everything we needed, and having been a race bike from new it was pretty much sorted parts-wise. A light restoration was all it really needed, so, as…

ARCHIVE Wayne Gardner, the first Australian 500cc World Champion, did things the hard way: he had to. Brought up on a background in dirt-track, where he raced from aged 15, he finally switched to the Tarmac at 18, and then thumbed his way to the UK aged 21. The aim: to get noticed by the top British teams, which was a good way of getting onto the world scene. A number of Aussie talents have trod this path since. While riding in the UK on a Moriwaki he soon drew the attention of Honda Britain, who hired him and gave him the chance for a number of Grand Prix wild-card rides – that he had to pay for. He said: “When people mention my hard-riding style, it came from being…

EVENT Cadwell Park is one of the oldest circuits in Britain – it has just celebrated its 90th birthday – and Classic Racer was there. Over the weekend of September 21/22, the much-loved venue held a very special party, which included some famous faces and names riding out on the 2.25 mile track, and in the many static displays that included many machines from Cadwell’s long and varied history – many of which had rarely been seen in public. Many of the big names who’d made their name in two-wheeled sport were there, including Ian Simpson, Roger Marshall, Matt Llewellyn, Roger Burnett, Steve Plater, Gary Johnson, as well as current BSB champ Kyle Ryde and team-mate Ryan Vickers. Also celebrating birthdays – and a number of these machines were at…

IN DETAIL: It doesn’t seem that long ago I was part of a small design and development team working on a new Wankel-powered Norton: actually it was 47 years ago! The bike was to have an air-cooled Wankel twin-rotor engine and monocoque style steel frame. By 1980 the bike was still not in production and I emigrated to the USA: 12 years later I read a Wankel-powered Norton racer had won the Isle of Man Senior TT, the last time a Norton had won the Senior was back in 1961! So, what of this winning Norton and what is a Wankel rotary engine? The latter is hard to explain in words, you can see a video on YouTube at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BCgl2uumlI this video features a typical layout of a Wankel twin-rotor…

PEOPLE Anybody reading this or past issues of Classic Racer will have seen many beautiful photographs by Don Morley – the doyen of motorcycle race photography. Some pictures are famous, seen in many newspapers and magazines and – in more recent years – shared without permission on the internet. All pictures encompass more than 50 years of a passion for motorsport in all its forms. It was an interesting route Don took, initially as a hobbyist, then as a news photographer, before concentrating on motorcycling and motorsport. In short, Don’s been there and done that. In his time, he’s covered world cup soccer tournaments, five Olympic Games, world championship golf events, major boxing fights, gymnastics, Formula 1 – but that’s not all. His lens has captured TV favourites Morecambe and…

His finest hour? At the time nobody knew it, but the year 2000 was to be the final time we would see the man who was simply known as ‘Joey, King of The Mountain’ race at his beloved TT. Looking back, it’s almost as if he wanted to ’sign off’ with something special. Well, what we witnessed was special, as special as the man himself. A remarkable hat-trick of victories, which took his all-time wins tally to a mind-blowing 26. It was no major surprise for ‘Yer Maun’ to do the business in both 125 and 250 races, but his victory in the F1 race stunned some of his most ardent fans. Indeed, there were many who thought that at 48 years of age, he probably wouldn’t win another ‘big…

ARCHIVE Yasutomo Nagai was one of the Yamaha factory’s favourite sons of the early 1990s. Nagai raced in the All-Japan championship for many seasons, seven of them with the Yamaha factory. Most notably, he took a win in the 1994 Bol d’Or with brothers Christian and Dominique Sarron, before joining a young Colin Edwards II in the new Yamaha World Superbike factory team for 1995 – which would be managed by Christian Sarron. As a wild-card rider he’d already taken a pole position at Sugo in 1994, as well as 3rd and 5th places in the two races. He was a major part of the development of the four-cylinder YZF750SP. The machine was a real ‘screamer’ compared to the-then dominant Ducati V-twins and their bulging torque delivery. The YZF would…

EVENT It was the 1990s heyday of World Superbikes all over again during the weekend of October 12/13 at the Stafford County Showground. That’s because two very special guests and the motorcycles they once raced in anger were the stars of the Carole Nash-backed Classic Motorcycle Mechanics Show. World Superbike legends Carl Fogarty and Frankie Chili wowed the crowds as they shared stories from their incredible racing careers while being interviewed by former World Superbike commentator Jack Burnicle. Fogarty, a four-time World Superbike Champion, remains a huge draw for fans, while Chili’s charisma and racing pedigree added an extra layer of excitement to the show. And that wasn’t all – race fans were thrilled to witness the reunion of two iconic race machines. For the first time in years, Carl…

METAL The Vostok multi of the 1960s achieved a degree of celebrity status on the GP stage, even if only a limited amount of success. It was a product of the Serpukhov Motorcycle Plant situated about 60 miles south of Moscow. But what was virtually unknown in the West, until the Iron Curtain was lifted, was that in the 1950s the Serpukhov factory produced a range of direct overhead cam (DOHC) racers, from 125cc to 500cc, dubbed simply ‘S’. As a preliminary, it has to be admitted that much about the S-bikes remains shrouded in mystery; with one exception they did not race outside the USSR, there was little reported about them in the Western press, photo captions have often been incorrect and translation mistakes have added to the confusion.…

PEOPLE The road-racing world has been familiar with the V&M Team since 1990, when Jack Valentine and Steve Mellor first dipped their toes into the British Championships, but the team had existed long before that. Valentine and Mellor (the ‘V’ and the ‘M’ in the team’s name) first met in the 1970s when they both worked at the same engineering company in Milnrow, near Rochdale. “We were both working as machine tool fitters for a local engineering company called Holroyd’s” Valentine says. “We both came through the firm’s apprentice training scheme.” Valentine first got into bikes just because they were such a big part of the local culture in his native Rochdale area. He says: “I lived on the edge of a moor and there was a lot of trials…

PEOPLEBarry CB500 Don Carcas and I have been absolutely flat out racing recently, so it’s been a bit of a rush to get this latest instalment of ‘Barry the Bike’ ready for you loyal Classic Racer readers… Oh and I’ve been writing about Supermono racers, but that’s for another issue. But back to this twin-cylinder machine… October 2023 was my first competitive experience on a CB500, riding a ‘renta-racer’ with No Limits Racing, and when you think about the history of Honda CB500 racing, you’d wonder why I didn’t get involved sooner. The ‘Honda CB500 Cup’ was first seen in France in 1996 and the first winner was none other than Sebastien Charpentier – a future double World Supersport champion no less, in 2005 and 2006. Not to be outdone,…