Innehållsförteckning för May - June 2025 från Classic Racer

Ballaugh Bridge and its associated jump are one of the seminal sights and sounds of the Isle of Man TT races. The main shot shows John Marcotte on his AJS in the 1956 Senior TT. The American seems to be doing the tried and tested method of keeping the bike as low as possible over the jump, with the rear landing first. Back in the day you’d probably be hard-pushed to get more than 30mph over the bridge itself, but times have changed and today’s machines can (should the rider take the bridge in a certain ‘style’) hit the bridge at twice that speed and ‘fly’ for up to 20 metres.... Care must be taken on landing because – rather like Cadwell Park’s Mountain, you can run the risk of…

Of course, the senior Honda staff who flew in from Japan to assist Joey Dunlop’s TT effort in 2000 knew who he was, and what he had achieved for their company, but not all had seen him in person. So, to be introduced to a small, grey-haired man wearing spectacles as he worked on his bike came as something of a shock… “The lads who came across from HRC in Japan were fairly bemused when they first saw Joey,” says Bob McMillan, who was general manager at Honda UK and very much Joey’s right-hand man. “They knew about him, but had never met him, and they just saw his silver hair and must have thought, in a nice sort of way: ‘What’s going on here?’ They certainly couldn’t have imagined…

Kagayama caught short! Rarely has BSB witnessed a more popular ‘imported’ rider, than Japan’s Yukio Kagayama. His outgoing personality, infectious smile and no-holds-barred riding style quickly endeared him to the fans. Signed by Paul Denning to ride the Rizla Suzuki GSX-R1000 alongside former British champion John Reynolds in 2003, he was holding fourth overall in the series, when his season came to an abrupt end following an horrific accident at Cadwell Park in the August. Resulting in injuries so severe, they were described as life threatening. Yuki was to spend five months in hospital, having broken his pelvis in two places (with complications), along with having given his ‘lower region’ an almighty bang, as Yuki said sometime after: “I have big world champion b*ll*cks!” He was also reported to once…

It was all his dad’s fault. Like many successful racers, Rob McElnea inherited the biking bug from his father, Robert Gerald ‘Gerry’ McElnea. “I got into bikes because my dad raced,” he says. “He started when he first came over from his native Monaghan in Ireland, looking for work in England. He rode a Triumph at places like Crystal Palace in the late 1950s. He was pretty good – he raced against the likes of John Surtees in national races. He got an offer to go Speedway riding for a factory team, even though he was a road racer.” Having stopped racing to start up his own structural engineering and steel erecting business in the 1960s, McElnea senior started competing again in 1972 and, by then, he had a bike-mad…

The Superstock series exploded into life 40 years ago, instantly capturing UK race fans’ imagination with its blend of souped-up streetbikes, star riders and fairing-bashing action. For several seasons the championship hogged headlines, entertained crowds and sparked controversy. And then, as abruptly as it had appeared, it was gone, having lost the variety and competitive spark that had been at the heart of its appeal. Superstocks would later be revived, of course, and still thrives as a fiercely contested class. But the combination of exotic Superbike-spec chassis with contrastingly stock, theoretically untouched engines has never regained the limelight in which it shone for a few spectacular seasons following its introduction in Easter 1985. Back then, the UK racing scene badly needed a boost. The country was struggling through a difficult…

V&M Racing closed their doors at the end of the 2002 season, but Jack Valentine and Steve Mellor continued to run a race team under the new ValMoto banner. Jack’s wife Doris was joint managing director, Mellor remained as chief engineer, and many other V&M staff members stayed on board too. “The idea was to offer an even more complete service than what had gone before,” Jack Valentine explains. Gone were the days of producing one-off bikes for individual riders. ValMoto could offer a complete racing service – including team management and full research and development programmes – not only for teams, but also for manufacturers and importers. And the first manufacturer the new team would work with was Triumph, but first – they had to get the gig… Time…

So far, only one parent and child combination has taken the ultimate two-wheeled championship, that of the old 500cc class and its current incarnation MotoGP, and that’s the great Kenny Roberts (1978, 79, 80 champ) and his boy, Kenny Junior (2000.) Junior grew up in a time when Senior was helping train not just the next generation of US talent, such as Doug Chandler, Wayne Rainey and John Kocinski, at his dirt-track ranch, but European riders. ‘Little Kenny’ as he would be called was never pushed into racing by his famous and successful father but – aged 15 – he made the decision himself after watching John Kocinski race at Willow Springs. Kenny Senior only backed Junior when he saw how determined he was. Sadly, despite this, the nepotism card…

Exactly 25 years ago in 2000 came a watershed year in World Superbike racing. Until then it had been a straightforward battle between the Italian V-twin Ducatis and the Japanese fours – but that was the year when WSBK’s grid make-up changed significantly. First, Honda decided to build a better Ducati – minus the desmo cylinder heads, and with a more rational true V-twin layout than the red bikes’ L-twin format. The result was the successful SP-1W (or RC51, as it was known Stateside), underlining the worth of Honda’s achievement from the very start by winning its first-ever World Superbike race at Kyalami in April 2000, in the hands of Colin Edwards. This led to seven more race victories and a well-earned World Championship crown for the Texas Tornado and…

Getting close to completing Barry the Honda CB500 race bike, most things appeared to be in place, but in reality there was still plenty of tidying up, track specific jobs, application of graphics, wiring etc, to be done. I don’t have a workshop, so Barry was lodging with Don Carcas, an hour-and-a-half’s drive away. I popped over when I could but Don was secretly doing lots of detailed graft in the background, in addition to fixing the bits I’d not done quite right, or rather, not up to his standard. The paintwork was done and the graphics had arrived from Mark at Ratmally, it was time for a big push to finish as the trip to Spain was looming… A brief recap: Barry Owen was a track-side marshal at Cadwell…