2008 Barry Sheene Classic

2008. A fine time to be a motorcyclist. Our bikes are lighter, faster and more evocative than ever before… or so we like to think. An event like the Barry Sheene Memorial, held over the Easter weeked adds some perspective to that smug, self-satisfied 21st century view. A visit to a classic race meeting like this is a trip through a wormhole or a stint in a suspended-animation chamber; 80 years of technology are compressed into a single weekend of track action as the familiar turbine howl of the immediate predecessors to the bikes we ride today follows the clatter of handbuilt post-war Brit singles out of pitlane. As riders, we’re lucky.

If oil paintings were our thing, we could only go watch the early examples of our art hanging on the wall in a gallery; we couldn’t go anywhere to see how it used to be done back in the day. Thanks to classic racing, though, we’re not stuck with bikes suspended in glass display cases under downlights or washed-out black-and-white photos of square-chinned Englishmen zipping past a stone wall at the Isle of Man. We can go back in time and experience motorcycling the way it used to look, sound and smell back when side-valve Harleys, Vincents, Manx Nortons, Honda Fours or – if you’re a complete n00b – SRAD GSX-R’s used to be the business.

Pre-1950 Historics
A field of only eight bikes was never going to make for a three-wide-into-Turn-1 knife-fight. Instead, the differing priorities for the riders quickly strung the field out the full length of the lap. Fitting, really, as these bikes all come from a time when staggered starts and time-trials were the norm. Bikes would race the clock (not the calendar, as a vicious rumour would have it), and the crowds would watch one lone bike drone past after another.

At more than 60 years of age, the bikes in the field were all little short of precious.

If something let go inside the engine or if things went upside down from pushing too hard, repairs could take months. Riders like Als Forune on the #941 hardtail Harley 750 and John Hudson on the #139 Velocette 350 looked unconcerned about where they finished. They were on their immaculately-turned-out pieces of motorcycling history and they were getting to blat them around a racetrack. Life was pretty good.

Damien Kavney, the youngster who raced something in every old-bike event at the meeting, pushed harder on the #10 hardtail Norton, but even he had nothing on Warwick Ellis, who took took it upon himself to be the class hooligan on the #101 Indian. He was late on the brakes, early on the gas and on a bike most riders wouldn’t know where to find the clutch (left foot pedal, like a car, incidentally). The 50-odd-year-old single-handedly showed that a bike is a bike is a bike, regardless of whether it remembers last year’s tour by the Nine Inch Nails, the Apollo moon landings, or the invasion of Normandy. They all throw into a corner roughly the same; you just have to be on it. Ellis certainly was; check his photos.

Classics and Post-Classics (aka Clubman and Premier classes)
Someone always takes things a bit too seriously at what you’d think would be a bit-of-a-laugh club meet. In the Clubman class, for bikes built between 1950 and 1966, it was Laurie Turnbull of Sydney’s Western Suburbs Motorcycle Club who put his hand up for the job. He donned his plain black leathers with his name and club inscribed in plain white lettering on the back, clamped his knees firmly to the sides of the tank of his spotless broad-nosed black-and-silver #127 Norton, grudgingly stuck his head in his Abe-replica Shoei because the organisers wouldn’t let him race in a set of biplane pilot’s goggles and a white piss-pot lid, and romped to victory in pretty much every race he entered without his arse ever leaving the seat.

Turnbull’s early-lap duels with riders like Neil May were absorbing to watch. May rode his regulation-black Manx Norton like a modern superbike – loose in the seat, chest just about on the tank, knee hard on the deck and throttle on hard from the apex onwards – while Turnbull stayed right over the rear tyre, keeled the #127 over as far as it would go and swept through corners with the exhaust lilting the note of an engine on just-above-neutral throttle. Don’t try that at your next trackday, kids. It worked for Turnbull because his tail-heavy 60’s racer didn’t need help keeping weight off the front to enable it to steer… and did it ever look the busines. These bikes look different, sound different and they are different to ride – and not just because of the drum front brakes and the right-foot gearchange.

Steve Cutting of Mona Vale’s Motorcycle Weaponry, racing in the same blue-and-orange set of Peel’s leathers he wore when, as a wildcard on a modestly-specced GSX-R1000K2, he shared the track with full-factory Superbikes at the 2003 WSB round, put in a similarly impressive-to-watch performance on the #56 Seeley-framed Norton twin in the Unlimited Clubman class. With 19″ wheels and kicked-out forks, there was only so fast the Norton could be steered, so Cutting showed off how to carry corner speed instead.

Damien Kavney’s number 10 made multiple appearances in the Classic and Post-Classic classes. He rode a Honda in the 500cc Clubman event, a Triumph 750 in the Unlimited Clubman class, and he was far from the only younger competitor in the field.

Pages: 1 2 3 4

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 11:47 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.