Innehållsförteckning för July - August 2024 från Classic Racer

ARCHIVE The weather… always ready to play havoc with people’s plans, upsetting the apple cart and – sometimes – producing a sporting result no one was expecting. As is often the case with the Isle of Man races, the weather played a major part in the 1974 TT and the various events during race week. In that year, the Formula 750 race was considered ‘the main event’ and it even replaced the blue riband Senior race as the last race of the week. If the fire-breathing 750s were supposed to walk it and put on a show, no one told the other bikes and riders. Around the TT course the smaller Yamaha twin-cylinder machines were making up time on all but the big straights in the often tricky conditions. In…

Some 50 years on from its 1974 debut, the TZ750 lives on, restored, maintained and ridden by an army of enthusiasts. To celebrate this amazing half-century, the Mallory Park Bike Bonanza held on July 6/7 will be hosting not only top TZ jockey Steve Baker, but also some amazing machines: and these are the very best. For more on the event go to: www.malloryparkcircuit.com/event/mallory-bike-bonanza-2024/ Keith Alderman “I’ll have two TZ750s for the bonanza, this one is an early twin-shock model decked out of Steve Baker’s original red and black Yamaha Motor Canada livery. “There’s a lot of detail on my red and black #32 bike that points to it coming from Steve Baker in the first place. I’d bought the bike at the end of 2011 as a twin-shock bike…

TEST Fred Walmsley is best known for the succession of Manx Norton and Matchless G50 classic racers he’s furnished over the past 30-plus years for the likes of Barry Sheene, Wayne Gardner, John McGuinness, and other stars of the past and present, to ride. Together, they’ve won dozens of Historic races around the world from the UK to Australia and all over Europe, with Walmsley-prepped bikes, all of them prepared in the well-equipped FWD (Fred Walmsley Developments) workshop attached to his farmhouse outside Preston, on the edge of the Lancashire fells. There the 77-year-old painstakingly re-created the bike bearing chassis no. FW02 with which Barry Sheene won what sadly transpired to be his last ever race at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on September 8, 2002 – three days before…

In the early 1970s, a new category of road racing was gathering momentum: Formula 750 was conceived as a production-based class to promote the new range of ‘superbikes’ which major manufacturers were then embracing. This brought an exciting new dimension to road racing – and the British were quick off the mark with their new racing BSA/ Triumph triples. Then, in 1971 Motor Circuit Developments launched the hugely successful Transatlantic Match Races which pitted British factory riders against their American counterparts over the Easter weekend in three rounds at Brands Hatch, Mallory Park and Oulton Park. The howl of the triples had barely faded when MCD boss Chris Lowe announced a Motorcycle News-backed British Superbike Championship, which would include the triples but open up the series to other new ‘superbikes’…

METAL Suzuki’s seminal RG500 racer will always be remembered for four riders’ world 500cc Grand Prix titles – Barry Sheene’s wins in 1976 and 1977, Marco Lucchinelli’s in 1981 and fellow Italian Franco Uncini’s in 1982. But the square-four two-stroke was more than that; importantly to Suzuki, the RG also notched up a staggering seven consecutive constructors’ world championships from 1976 to 1982 and in 1976 RGs took 11 of the top 12 placings in that year’s championship. This is what sets it apart from other iconic race machinery – it was affordable for privateers while giving superb performance. Made available from 1976 to join the factory versions, the over-thecounter RG was so competitive it gave a real chance of success to talented racers around the globe. If you had…

ARCHIVE Eddie Lawson is one of the greatest riders of the ‘modern’ era of motorcycle racing. He came from the same California ‘crucible’ of dirt-track riding as Wayne Rainey in the 1970s – but was a few years ahead. He moved intoTarmac racing in 1979 and became a double AMA Superbike champ in 1981 and 1982, and 250cc champ in 1980 and 1981. By 1983 he would move into 500cc Grands Prix as Kenny Roberts’ team-mate, just as the three-time champ was in his final season battling the young Freddie Spencer.There was no fairytale and Spencer took the title. Then, four decades ago, Eddie took his first world title – and in some style. ‘Steady’ Eddie they called him – but steady was surely fast. Spencer may have won five…

From that moment on, Kavanagh was a road-racer and a very capable one, resulting in his selection as Victoria State’s nomination for Australia’s 1951 Isle of Man TT team. Although Kavanagh’s first rides in the TT that year ended in retirements, the potential was clear, not only in his race performance (sixth place in the Senior at the start of the seventh and last lap) but also in his approach to learning the Mountain course, taking five weeks off work (assembling Norton Dominators at Bracebridge Street) to ride, walk and study the circuit prior to official practice. Shortly after the TT, he scored a 350cc/500cc ‘double’ win at Tarare in France, then a third place in his first Continental Grand Prix, the 350cc Dutch. For the Ulster Grand Prix in…

PEOPLE Team Allspeed has always enjoyed taking part in the various series where we can use our TZR250 racer – most notably the Yamaha Past Masters Series. Some of our exploits have been in Classic Racer’s sister-title Classic Motorcycle Mechanics. As proprietors of both Gibson exhausts and Allspeed (www.gibsonexhausts. co.uk) we thought we’d expand our racing efforts after dipping our toes into the CRMC (Classic Racing Motorcycle Club’s) Superstock 400 class last season. But first, we need to sort the bikes out… Kawasaki ZXR400 Last year, we entered Adam Carson on a Honda CBR400 I had picked up locally in the CRMC Superstock 400 class. He enjoyed the class, but the Honda CBR is just a bit too underpowered, it seemed that the bike to have was Kawasaki’s ZXR400. I…

Rod Gould, the 1970 World 250cc Champion, died on April 17 at the age of 80, after a long struggle with cancer. His passing means that there are now no longer any survivors of Britain’s long list of great champions from the glory days of the premier Grand Prix categories of World Championship racing. Rod started racing on a 350cc BSA Gold Star in a production class race at Silverstone in 1961, and immediately showed his potential. The bike refused to fire up right away and he was left alone on the start-line as the 40-strong field accelerated away. But over the course of 10 laps of the 1.5mile circuit he slashed through the field to win the 350cc class and finish 9th overall. Five years later, he was one…

ARCHIVE It’s three decades since Carl Fogarty became World Superbike champion for the first time. What followed from the nail-biting last-round championship win in 1994 was Carl’s domination on the Ducati V-twin, with three more titles coming in 1995, 1998 and 1999. Foggy would go on to break records for wins in the class, which were only recently beaten by six-time WSB champ Jonathan Rea. Fogarty’s championship win was made all the more remarkable thanks to injury and big changes to his Ducati team. Coming off the back of a successful 1993 where he was runner-up to Scott Russell on the Kawasaki ZXR750, the sensible move may have been keeping things the same. Instead, Ducati brought out a replacement for the 888 – the 916 racer – and replaced his…

Pat Hennen was the first American to win a Grand Prix. As such, he was the trailblazer for the American invasion that followed in his wake – riders like Kenny Roberts, Freddie Spencer, Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey and Kevin Schwantz went on to dominate 500cc Grands Prix throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Hennen’s win in Sweden in 1976 was so unexpected that it caught the race organisers off-guard. “When I won the race, the FIM didn’t have the American anthem to play during the awards ceremony because no American had ever won a race,” Hennen said. “so they played the British national anthem instead.” Hennen made amends by wearing a cowboy hat on the podium. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1953, Pat moved to the San Francisco…

Former TT race winner, five-time Scottish champion and brilliant race engineer Bill Simpson has died at the age of 78 after a short battle with liver cancer. Father of five-time British champion and triple TT winner Ian Simpson, Bill served as his son’s mechanic and mentor throughout his career but had already enjoyed a successful racing career of his own by the time Ian started racing. He won five Scottish championships in the 1970s, but the highlight of his racing career came in 1976 when he and Chas Mortimer teamed up to win the 10-lap 250 Production TT on a Yamaha RD250. Bill was also the first man to lap the TT course at 110mph on a 350cc machine, and he even made a bit of a comeback as late…

PEOPLEPART TWO Last issue, I explained about a very special person, Barry Owen. Barry was a marshal (and they are special enough) but Barry picked me up out of the gravel more than once, and as I said, he was always up for a chat at the end of the day whether I’d been racing or coaching. When Barry died, his son Rick was clearing his dad’s garage out, selling some of his machines; one of them was Barry’s road-going CB500. Now, I’m aware that converting a CB500 road bike to a racer has been done many times before, but for me it’s all about the personal sentiment of the Barry the Bike project; so I bought his bike with a plan to rebuild and race it in homage to…