Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2024 i Classic Racer

Barry Sheene’s last year of racing was the 1984 season… a year earlier than planned. For Barry, it seemed neater to end at the close of the 1985 season, when he was 35 years of age. However, he finally announced his retirement at a press conference atThe Mayfair Hotel, London in January 1985 and it was understandable why. He said at the event: “Since the accident (Silverstone, 1982) it’s been very difficult for me to get a competitive bike, or one good enough to win the world championship on. I've been trying over the last couple of months, but I couldn’t get one, so now seemed like a good time to give it up.” Rumours were that he’d been asked by Italian firm Cagiva to run a couple of their…

The 1960s was a golden period for Honda, where the burgeoning giant from the east demonstrated just what it could design, build and engineer. The various tiddlers that almost everyone dismissed as being flawed, unreliable, useless and so much more proved to be anything but… much to disgust of the firm’s detractors. The sales of apparently inconsequential step through mopeds to developing nations helped finance better facilities back in Japan which then created larger capacity bikes. The whole thing soon snowballed and helped fund the development of first the sensational CB450 Black Bomber and then the landmark CB750. As a backdrop to this, the firm had been very successfully utilising road racing as a way to get maximum exposure and PR. Soichiro Honda had realised that racing success would directly…

Four years of racing on the world stage on bikes that weren’t always competitive had left John Reynolds feeling he had a point to prove when he returned to race in the UK in 1997. Wealthy businessman Ben Atkins had formed a new team with backing from Red Bull, built around JR, and it was rumoured to have a budget of £1 million, which would have easily made it the biggest team in the paddock at that point. Reynolds would be joined in the team by Steve Hislop, and their weapon of choice was Ducati’s all-conquering 916. Everything was in place for a crack at the world’s most prestigious domestic championship, but Reynolds had mixed feelings about returning to UK shores. “I definitely felt I had a point to prove…

PEOPLE I met Phil Read as a 19-year-old in 1968, our relationship existed for 54 years until October 6, 2022 when he passed. So much has been written about the rider Phil Read that I would just like to add that he was a gifted rider of exceptional class. In addition, he was also technically very well-versed, and always looking for something new. Whether that has always worked out well, I have my doubts. I would like to highlight the personal side of Phil, the man I have experienced up close for so many years. When I started working for him, I was 19 years old. I lived with Phil and Madeleine in the same house for almost two years. There I was able to experience how they were as…

ARCHIVE Perhaps needing the loo made Whitham fast at this event – at least that’s what top racer and paddock funny bloke James Michael Whitham (known to most as Jamie) reckons. He only won one World Superbike race – at Sentul in 1994, our shot here is from Albacete – and (despite being a factory Suzuki racer in 1997 and 1998) never repeated the feat. Riding for Hoss Elm’s Moto Cinelli team, they had factory Ducati 916 racers in a team run by Hoss, who was also the boss of Cinelli, then the UK’s Ducati importer for 1994. In his most excellent biography ‘What a good do’ Jamie says: “Sentul went right from the start – apart from me having the trots.You’re told to drink bottled water but I didn’t…

PEOPLE From the very first TT in 1907, the magazines Motor Cycling and The Motor Cycle reported the races, and, good though their coverage was, being weekly publications they were always a few days behind. Back in the 1920s there was no telephone link between the Isle of Man and the mainland UK (or the ‘adjacent island’ as Manx folk like to refer to it), and both weekly magazines used to send lap-by-lap summary telegrams to agents who subscribed to the service. These were immediately posted up in the showroom/shop window where, for the duration of the race, a good crowd of enthusiasts gathered (and maybe one or two could later be enticed into the shop!) There was clearly scope for a more ‘news-sheet’ kind of reporting, which could be…

METAL Yamaha’s TZ250 has a long and illustrious race career at both national and international level and its history and achievements should always be remembered: Especially now top-level two-stroke racers are no more… Thankfully, they still get ridden at some levels – and often in anger. My time on the TZ250 is memorable enough. I had ridden a 1991 TZ250 in a one-off ‘Stars of Tomorrow’ meeting at Lakeside, Queensland, in 1994, grabbing one of my early road race wins in the process. The only other time was a 1995 TZ250 at Phillip Island, again in a one-off race meeting in the Victorian Championships in 1998. It was Shaun Geronimi’s spare bike that year in his Australian title campaign and it was another good experience on the little TZ, winning…

There’s a funny thing with sidecar engines. Well it’s a rule really, that if an engine is any good in a solo it’ll be rubbish in a sidecar and vice versa. In the 1960s Triumph solos won everything, but they weren’t a serious proposition in a chair. You wanted a BSA. The same held true for the German machines. Who raced a BMW solo? Not even the Germans. Kim Newcombe tried a Konig solo and did quite well, but no one else got anywhere. Yet in the sidecars BMWs then Konigs were the thing to have. As newer engines came along it was much the same. Roy Woodhouse and Dick Greasley both had Honda 750s for a while. They were quick, Dick Mann won on one at Daytona. We thought…

As the 1978 season got under way, the Texaco Heron Suzuki GB team was riding the crest of a wave and couldn’t seem to do any wrong. The squad had won the last two 500cc Grand Prix world championships and had retained the services of the man who won them, Barry Sheene. After showing great promise in 1977, Pat Hennen also looked like being a serious title contender and kept his slot with the team. With such talent on board, the bosses at Suzuki GB felt no need to sign a third rider in Grands Prix – they already had the two favourites. Or so they thought. What they hadn’t accounted for was an American rookie called Kenny Roberts. Roberts had wanted to stay at home and continue racing in…

Troy Bayliss – teak-tough Aussie, hard b*stard, top racer and multiple world champion in World Superbikes, he’s also one of the few to have won in both WSB and 500cc/MotoGP… But – that MotoGP win took a long time coming. He’d had the odd wild-card race in 250s at World Championship level before, being drafted in to replace the injured Carl Fogarty, following the Brit’s career-ending crash in 2000. Of course, by now he was a British champion with GSE Racing and had been brought into the Ducati fold… It was a wise move as he’d win the 2001 series and run Colin Edwards very close for 2002 – then be taken into the new Ducati MotoGP squad for 2003. For whatever reasons, he was a little overshadowed by his…

PEOPLE PHIL READ WAS MANY THINGS. HE WAS A FIERCE COMPETITOR, A GIFTED RACER, A COMPLICATED CHARACTER, BUT OVERALL HE WAS A GREAT CHAMPION AND A LEGEND! On New Year’s Day in 1969, when Phil Read woke up to celebrate his 30th birthday, he was the reigning world champion in both the 125 and 250cc classes, and should have been looking forward to capitalising on that situation in the season to come. The reality was very different: he was out of work and had no immediate prospects of employment… Yamaha, the team for which he had won four world championships, had pulled out of Grand Prix racing at the end of the 1968 season, as had Honda and Suzuki a year earlier. But although the departure of all of the…

IN DETAIL: The premier AMA road racing class in the 1960s was production based with a rule that gave side-valve engines a one-third capacity advantage over overhead valve engines! Most European factories had not used side-valves in race engines since the First World War. The reason for the rule was the influence KR side-valve manufacturer Harley-Davidson had on the AMA board. However, the huge sales potential in the USA market meant companies like Triumph needed the publicity of racing despite the capacity handicap. Triumph’s top-selling 650cc parallel twin overhead valve machine was not eligible for AMA competition. The 500cc T100 Tiger though had an over-square engine with a bore and stroke of 69mm x 65 5mm perfect for Triumph’s US race program. Initially Triumph let its dealers head up the…

Reigning 1976 world speedway champion Peter Collins was ready to defend his title, but his last minute preparations were hit by a major snag. He broke his leg, badly. The timing couldn’t have been worse, just a week before the 1977 final was due to be held, with 12 months’ planning ready to be binned. A withdrawal from the one-off final in Gothenburg, Sweden would seemingly be the only possible thing to do. After all, you can't ride, let alone win a bruising speedway world final, with a busted leg. Speedway: A sport where a few inches separate four riders on a tight 400 metre shale track. All competitors are on 500cc four-stroke single cylinder methanol burning bikes, tuned to within an inch of their lives to achieve 0-60mph in…

PEOPLE Born in 1942, Ray Palmer hailed from Crayford, north Kent. The area was home to a number of engineering concerns and in the way of these things the locality became a hotbed of motorcycle activity, with a strong bent towards road racing. As Ray came of motorcycling age, he got to know Alan Dawson, Steve Dempsey, Dave Downer, Pat Mahoney, Colin Seeley, Syd Mizen and Bob White, all involved in racing and all part of the local scene. Suitably inspired, with a copy of Phil Irving's seminal book 'Tuning for Speed', Ray applied the lessons learned to his BSA C12 that was his only means of transport at the time. Testing his handiwork resulted in part of a con-rod appearing through the crankcases. After that misfortune, his luck began…

RAINEY SEASON A LOOK AT WAYNE’S FINAL RACE YEAR BILL IVY HIS TIME WITH JAWA GOING FIOR-WARD FIOR’SYAMAHA XS12 DARREN DIXON WIZARD ON TWO WHEELS AND THREE! TEAM TALK HERON SUZUKI – PART THREE MARVELLOUS MOUNTAIN CADWELL PARK IN FOCUS *The next issue of Classic Racer is on sale on February 15. The editor reserves the right to move things about a bit, depending on space available, to bring you the best motorcycle racing features from across many decades! So don’t moan at him if something isn’t in the mag – instead, why not get a subscription? Check out page 22.…