BARRY SHEENE
1950–2003
THE BIOGRAPHY
STUART BARKER

COPYRIGHT

Thorsons Element

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublisbers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in 2003

This paperback edition first published in 2004

© Stuart Barker 2003

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007161812

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN 9780007378586

Version: 2016-01-05

DEDICATION

For my parents, Jim and Josie Barker,

for starting this whole thing.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1 Cockney Rebel?

2 The Racer: Part One

3 Playboy

4 No Fear

5 The Racer: Part Two

6 The Great Divide

7 The Racer: Part Three

8 Crusader

9 The Racer: Part Four

10 What It Takes

11 Never Say Never Again

12 Cancer

13 A Star Without Equal

Major Career Results

Keep Reading

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

‘I’m not going to let fucking cancer get in the way of me enjoying myself.’

It was like nothing had ever changed. The famous Donald Duck logo on the black and gold crash helmet could just be made out as the tall, gangly rider tucked in behind the bike’s screen, reducing wind drag to gain a fraction of a second over his pursuer. The equally famous number seven, crossed through European-style, was emblazoned on the bike’s bodywork as it had been almost 30 years before. It had always been lucky for him. Maybe it could be again.

His 51 years counted for nothing when he was on a motorcycle; it was as much a part of him as the plates, pins and 27 screws that held his legs together. The smooth but aggressive riding style, the determined and sustained attack, could all have belonged to a 20-year-old kid with a fire in his belly and a burning desire to win against the odds. Any odds.

Behind him, the 1987 500cc motorcycle Grand Prix world champion Wayne Gardner tried everything he knew to close the 1.3-second gap. But despite being 10 years younger and having a bike which was 20mph faster than the man out front, there was nothing he could do to get past. The distinctive riding style of the race leader hadn’t changed since he’d started racing bikes in 1968, and his desire to win appeared to be no less now than it was then. It was as if he still had something to prove.

The crowd, as ever, yelled their delight at the on-track bravado of the man in black, urging him on, willing him to make that decisive break, wanting him, needing him to dig deeper to secure a victory. Many of them had been teenagers when they first thrilled to their hero’s titanic battles with the best riders in the world, most of the races televised on ITV’s Saturday-afternoon World of Sport programme – warm, comforting memories of a childhood long gone. There were thousands in attendance who wouldn’t even have had an interest in motorcycles had it not been for the influence of the man who was out there throwing his bike hard over from side to side, skimming his knees off the Tarmac with a grace and style all of his own and gunning his steed down the straights as fast as the laws of physics would allow.

For the vast majority of the crowd, there was only one rider in the race; they would love him, applaud him and later mob him whether he came first or last. But Barry Sheene wasn’t accustomed to coming last. Even after 18 years of retirement from the sport that made him an international superstar, a multi-millionaire and one of the true icons of the seventies, he was out there proving he still had what it took to win races.

The more imaginative among the packed grandstands and trackside enclosures could have transported themselves, mentally if not physically, back to the halcyon days of the seventies when Sheene was on top of the world as the most famous motorcycle racer in history, a pin-up glamour boy for millions of teenage girls and a Boys’ Own hero for an entire generation of lads. Dads and mums alike now took great pleasure in pointing out to their own kids the very man who had quickened their young pulses nearly three decades earlier.

But even the most nostalgic of spectators were forced, however reluctantly, to admit that things were different this time round. For starters, it was 2002, not 1976. And this was not a 500cc Grand Prix World Championship race, it was a classic bike race being staged at the Goodwood Revival event organized by Sheene’s close friend, the Earl of March. Sheene’s bike, a classic sixties Manx Norton, was a far cry from the vicious 130bhp, 170mph monsters he used to tame on race tracks around the world for the pleasure of millions. But the fans didn’t care. It was still Barry Sheene out there, he was still racing a bike, he was still winning, and that was all that mattered.

The most significant change of all, the thing that really brought a lump to the throats of so many and which made Sheene’s eventual victory over Gardner even more remarkable and emotional, was the recently divulged fact that Barry had cancer. This was the first time he had appeared in public since being diagnosed. The poignancy of his win was not lost on the 80,000-strong crowd who realized they were probably witnessing Sheene’s last-ever race.

Barry had been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and upper stomach just a few weeks earlier, and there were more than a few tears shed as he crossed the line, removed his helmet and waved to the masses on his victory lap. He had come a long way to get to Goodwood in the sleepy West Sussex countryside – from the other side of the world, in fact. An 18-hour direct flight from Australia is gruelling enough for most passengers, never mind one suffering from cancer. But to ride flat-out against some supremely talented opposition, including former world champions Gardner and Freddie Spencer, and to eventually take the race win gave all his fans reason to believe that this time cancer had picked the wrong body. Sheene was a fighter and a winner; he had proved it many times before. Surely, if anyone could beat the most dreaded of diseases, it was he.

When news of his illness broke, Sheene shocked fans around the world by announcing he would not be undergoing invasive surgery or chemotherapy to treat his condition. Instead, he would rely on alternative cures and a special frugal diet. Sheene had already lost a stone off his slight frame by the time he appeared at Goodwood, and orthodox oncologists warned that he risked malnutrition by continuing with the diet. But Sheene has always done things his own way, and he was adamant when interviewed by Motor Cycle News: ‘I’m not going to be fighting this in the conventional way. I won’t subject my body to chemotherapy. I’m putting my faith in the natural way.’

Typically for a man who had made a living out of cheating death, Barry put a brave face on his illness and already had his quips and quotes worked out for the media. ‘I don’t like cancer, but it’s growing on me’; ‘If I don’t beat this my wife’s going to kill me.’ These were just two of the lines he bandied about like a stand-up comic living in denial of the very real risk to his life. Sheene also insisted that he wasn’t ‘going to let fucking cancer get in the way of me enjoying myself’ and admitted that his second thought upon hearing his diagnosis was that he might have to miss the Goodwood event. It hadn’t taken long for him to re-establish control, pack a suitcase and catch a flight; he wasn’t about to let down his fans. Anyway, it wasn’t as if fighting for survival was something new to Sheene. In the past he had astounded some of the most respected doctors and surgeons in the world with his ability to recover from serious injuries in unheard-of time spans.

Well-publicized X-rays of his shattered legs from two horrific high-speed crashes played as much a part in making him a household name as any of his victories on the race track. In 1975, his rear tyre blew out at 178mph on the notorious banked section of the Daytona Speedway in Florida. The crash, captured by a television documentary crew who were following Sheene at the time, was shown on TV news programmes around the world, and the incident made Barry famous overnight. His leg was broken so badly it was twisted up behind him, out of sight, making him think he had lost it. He also lost shocking amounts of skin and broke his forearm, wrist, six ribs and a collarbone, as well as suffering compression fractures to several vertebrae. On top of that, damage to his kidneys meant he urinated blood for several weeks. Despite the serious nature of his injuries, Sheene did not lose his 60-a-day passion for strong, unfiltered cigarettes – he preferred the French brand Gauloises, but would happily smoke any brand that was being offered around – and insisted on being wheeled out of the hospital on his bed from time to time so that he could smoke. The hole he drilled in the chin bar of his crash helmet so that he could have a puff on the starting grids at race meetings remains the stuff of legend in bike racing circles, but no one was laughing any more. Sheene’s heavy smoking habit, which had started when he was just nine years old, was one factor cited as a possible cause of his cancer.

The Daytona disaster was the kind of accident that would take ‘normal’ people months, if not years, to recover from. Many would never overcome the psychological scars of remembering every bone-crushing, skin-shredding second of their crash, and would certainly never contemplate getting back on a motorcycle again, but then most people aren’t Barry Sheene. He was racing again just seven weeks later with an 18-inch pin in his left thigh bone, and went on to win his first World Championship the following year.

Crashes are common in bike racing, but big ones like Sheene’s Daytona incident are rare – at least, it’s rare to survive them. Broken arms or legs are frequent injuries, as are abrasions, damaged tendons and general cuts and bruising, but few people live through, or are unfortunate enough to have in the first place, crashes at such extreme speeds. Sheene had not one but two. The second happened seven years and two World Championships later (Barry retained the title in 1977 and was awarded an MBE for doing so) at the Silverstone circuit in England, and it was every bit as bad, if not worse, than the first. Sheene struck a crashed bike which was lying on the circuit just above a blind rise and its fuel tank instantly ignited causing a massive explosion. He had been travelling at around 165mph at the moment of impact. Moments later, another bike hit the wreckage causing another explosion; the resulting carnage resembled the aftermath of a terrorist bombing. Sheene’s already fragile legs had been smashed again, this time more gravely than before, and he also suffered injuries to his head, chest and kidneys.

But while his body was in bad shape, his mental attitude remained as gritty as ever. He told gathered reporters from his hospital bed that ‘Broken bones are a mechanical problem. You can fix them.’ Sheene’s surgeon, Nigel Cobb, inserted plates, pins and a total of 27 screws into his famous patient’s legs and triggered a barrage of schoolboy gags about Barry Sheene and airport metal detectors. But his rate of recovery, once again, was phenomenal.

If Barry Sheene had been a star before his Silverstone crash, he was a superstar after it – and, it appeared, an invincible one. No bike racer before or since has commanded anywhere near the same amount of media coverage as Sheene. It is inconceivable in the current climate of the sport to imagine a national newspaper running a front page story on a bike racer just because he’d met a new blonde girlfriend, and how many other bikers could have starred alongside boxer Henry Cooper in a terrestrial TV advert for a body scent encouraging users to ‘Splash it on all over’? How many racers counted members of the Beatles as close personal friends and dined with Hollywood legends such as Cary Grant? None.

As well as being a world champion racer, Barry Sheene was a marketing phenomenon, gaining exposure for his growing attachment of sponsors in areas even they couldn’t have imagined. He co-hosted ITV’s Just Amazing! show in the eighties and was the star attraction at the 1982 BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards when he rode his new Suzuki onstage and announced he’d be leaving Yamaha to join Suzuki for the following season. He starred as himself in the (very bad) movie Space Riders, and appeared on every major television show of his time from Parkinson to Swap Shop and Jim’ll Fix It to Russell Harty. But perhaps the most enduring legacy of Barry’s fame is that he’s still the only biker the general public as a whole have heard of. Ask any one of them to name a motorcycle racer and they’ll invariably say Barry Sheene. The same thing happens whenever anyone, young or old, is attempting to go too fast or to do something stupid on a two wheeler, be it a motorcycle or a pushbike. The response from policemen and dads alike is always the same: ‘Who do you think you are, son, Barry Sheene?’

Everyone appreciated a British sportsman who was capable of beating the world in an era when such a thing wasn’t (and, sadly, still isn’t) commonplace. Sheene remains the last British rider to win a Grand Prix World Championship despite the fact that he last held the title 25 years ago. Even more than his ability to win, the public applauded his guts and bravery as he came back not once but twice from injuries that would have ended any other sportsman’s career. After his Silverstone crash, Sheene was extremely lucky to be able to walk again, let alone be fit enough to win motorcycle races.

It was this fighting spirit, this never-say-die attitude, which gave hope to millions when Barry announced he was ready to battle cancer and wouldn’t be beaten in the fight. With typical bravado, he commented shortly after being diagnosed that it was ‘a complete pain in the arse’, and vowed to deal with it.

It was a great irony that a man who had spent 16 years risking his life on a motorcycle should retire from the sport still in one piece only to face death from a creeping, silent and devastating opponent from within. The irony was not lost on those who remembered that Britain’s other great champion motorcyclist, Mike Hailwood, was killed in retirement by an errant lorry driver while returning in his car from his local fish and chip shop. Sheene’s former rivals, as well as his constant supporters, were without exception shocked by the news of his cancer, and all of them rallied round to offer words of support and encouragement. Old differences were forgotten. The only thing that mattered was for Sheene to concentrate on beating his disease.

Barry Sheene was the first, and arguably the last, truly mainstream motorcycle racer who could genuinely lay claim to being a household name. In truth, there was no need for him after 1982 to continue to risk life and limb on a 180mph motorcycle when he was already a multi-millionaire with a twelfth-century, 34-bedroom mansion in Surrey, his own helicopter and a guaranteed career outside racing whenever he decided to call it quits. But that’s what made him Barry Sheene: his determination to be the best, to be the fastest, never to give up, to push a 130bhp motorcycle past its limits and bring it back safely again. Sometimes he didn’t bring it back safely; sometimes the bike would savagely bite back and spit Sheene off like an angry rodeo steer ditching its rider. But Sheene always got back on. He always returned to show the bike, and his public, who was boss.

But at the age of just 51, Sheene had a new and even more deadly opponent than a badly behaved, viciously powerful motorcycle, a more lethal foe than speed itself, and a more cunning enemy than any he had faced off before. He had cancer. Without doubt, it would prove to be the toughest battle of his impressive but painful career, but on that day at Goodwood there seemed to be no one in the world with a mindset more suited to combating the biggest killer of modern times. He had cheated death many times before. All he had to do was cheat it one more time.

CHAPTER 1 COCKNEY REBEL?

‘For me, school was like a bad dream. Every minute of every day was murder.’

If you’re going to be a motorcycle racer, you’re going to have to get used to pain, discomfort and hospital food. Barry Sheene had a very early introduction to all three. Almost from the moment he was born he suffered from infantile eczema which caused him, and his mother Iris, years of sleepless nights as Barry tossed around in his cot scratching and clawing at every part of his tiny body seeking a moment’s respite from the maddening, all-enveloping itch. As anyone who’s ever had the misfortune to suffer from severe eczema will testify, it’s not a very pleasant condition. Barry’s torment increased at the age of two when he also developed chronic asthma. The infant Sheene therefore had to endure the double misery of an infernal itch while struggling for breath at the same time. Almost from the moment he was born, he learned about tolerance to pain, about how to overcome illness, about how never to give up in the struggle back to health. These experiences would stand him in good stead.

Sadly, 11 September is a date that will now always be remembered for the wrong reasons following the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 2001, but in 1950 the date was significant in the Sheene family’s London household because it was when Frank and Iris welcomed into the world their second child, having already given birth to a daughter, Margaret. Barry Stephen Frank Sheene was born at 8.55 p.m. on a Monday evening and was later taken home to a four-bedroom flat in Queens Square, Holborn, just off Gray’s Inn Road in London WC1.

Much has been made of whether or not Sheene, having been born and raised in WC1, can actually lay claim to being a genuine cockney. Traditionally (and according to the Collins Dictionary definition), the only qualification required for the title is to be ‘born within the sound of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow church’, or the ‘Bow Bells’ as they are more commonly referred to. Since weather conditions, white noise and the relative abilities of one’s hearing will naturally affect the range of the bells, it appears to be a moot point in Sheene’s case. There is no strict dividing line painted around London to define which streets are ‘cockney’ and which are not, but it’s probably fair to say that those living further east in the city disputed Sheene’s claim while the rest of the world happily accepted it. Still, Sheene was proud of his cockney roots and no one is in a position to deny him those roots with any authority.

Sheene’s father Frank, or Franco as he has always been affectionately called by his son, was the resident engineer at the Royal College of Surgeons. The family’s flat went with the job, as did a fully equipped workshop out back which was to prove of significant importance to the young Barry in the years that followed. The family was neither wealthy nor poor; Barry would later describe his family’s socio-economic status as ‘slightly above average’. Iris worked at the college as a housekeeper to top up the family income and Frank brought in some handy extra cash working as a mechanic and bike tuner in the evenings. By the mid-sixties he had earned such a good reputation as a two-stroke tuner that world champions including Bill Ivy and Phil Read came knocking on his door. The former was a hero to Barry, but he was sadly killed in a racing accident when Barry was still young. The latter would start out as a friend before falling out with Barry in 1975 over an alleged bribe attempt, more of which later.

Work became plentiful for Frank, and his skills were highly valued by any racer who had the money and wanted his motorcycle to go faster. It was Frank’s skill with all things mechanical that saved his son’s manhood after a nightmare incident when Barry was just four years old; eczema and asthma notwithstanding, his well-being suffered a further setback, as Michael Scott related in his 1983 book Barry Sheene: A Will to Win. According to Iris Sheene, Barry had been playing with a clockwork toy train while being bathed in the kitchen sink when he suddenly let out a terrible scream. When a panicked Iris turned to see the cause of the commotion, she noticed that the bodywork of the train was missing (probably due to Barry’s early curiosity for all things mechanical) but the cogs and mechanisms had caught his foreskin and were still churning away, tearing into the sensitive flesh of her child’s genitalia. A traumatized Barry was rushed to a nearby hospital where his father exercised all his skill in dismantling the train’s workings while desperately holding back the tightly loaded spring that was the cause of his son’s agony. Eventually Frank worked the train loose at the expense of much blood and some tissue, but Barry would have much to thank his father for in later years when he came of age. Had it not been for his father’s skill and quick thinking, Barry Sheene the playboy might never have been. It was a fortunate escape, and by no means Barry’s last.

Frank began to pass on his considerable mechanical knowledge to his son from a very early age. Before her death from a brain tumour in 1991, Iris recalled, ‘When he [Barry] was only eighteen months old, I can remember him wandering around in his dungarees with a spanner in his hand.’ There was to be an early introduction to race meetings, too: from the age of four Barry was being dragged around bike events, soaking up the addictive sights and smells of paddocks all over England and, on occasion, overseas as well. Frank had raced a variety of motorcycles as an amateur for many years, both before and after the war (he won a trophy on the famous Brooklands circuit just before war broke out). He was a competent and enthusiastic club racer but never really World Championship material. Nor did he have the longing to be a world champion; his interest lay more in the preparation and tuning of machinery, and he was most certainly world class at that. Further cementing the Sheene family’s ties with motorcycle racing was Frank’s brother Arthur, himself an extremely capable speedway rider for Coventry and a loyal member of ‘Team Sheene’ once Barry took up racing.

Unlike his son, Frank was a keen supporter of the Isle of Man TT races which at that time was still the most important bike event in the world. It was when he took five-year-old Barry to the Island for what was already his second TT trip that the youngster found himself having health traumas yet again, and this time it really did look bad. Set as it is in the middle of the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man’s wet and misty climate is not particularly suited to asthma sufferers. Barry suffered such a severe attack that he quite literally turned blue. He was rushed to Nobles Hospital where he was detained for three days until his breathing returned to normal. It was the start of an unhappy relationship with the Isle of Man which would have far-reaching consequences in later years.

But Sheene was always quick to spot an opportunity and was extremely adept at turning ill fortune to his advantage. Rather than seeing his asthma as a disability, he found ways to make it work for him. For starters, it was a good excuse for getting out of school sports, of which he was never fond; it was an even better excuse for playing truant, and he regularly told teachers he had asthma clinics to attend. To be fair, sometimes he did have legitimate appointments, but there were many more occasions when he didn’t. His truancy habit was made considerably easier to sustain when Sheene found a pile of pre-stamped appointment cards on one particular visit to a clinic. Spotting a golden opportunity, he promptly pocketed the lot, got a friend to sign them, and from then on enjoyed what amounted to a healthy supply of get-out-of-school-free cards. They were not wasted.

Sheene’s hatred of school has been well documented. It’s not that he didn’t have an aptitude for learning – as he would later prove by teaching himself five languages and learning to pilot a helicopter – it was just that he didn’t like it. And when Barry Sheene didn’t like doing something, he didn’t do it. He didn’t like the work, he didn’t like the discipline, and most of all he didn’t like the teachers. ‘For me, school was like a bad dream,’ he said. ‘Every minute of every day was murder. I hated being told what to do and when to do it by a bunch of teachers who always wanted to try to insult me or belittle me.’ Sheene didn’t respond well to being told what to do. If he was given a free rein, as he was in Frank’s workshop, he displayed a fantastic ability to learn, but he resented the apparently pointless rigidity of the school environment. That stubborn streak would remain with him throughout his life, and it helped him amass a fortune as a property developer in Australia when he stopped racing motorcycles. Barry’s headmaster at St Martin’s in the Fields once told Iris that her son could have been top boy if he had only put his mind to it, but Barry simply wasn’t interested. He had decided at a very early age that he would do things his own way or not at all. That same headmaster sent his former pupil a letter of congratulations when he won the 500cc World Championship in 1976, a fact of which Barry was understandably proud. It was, after all, a written acknowledgement of achievements attained without the aid of formal education.

Sheene brought up the subject of his schooldays again in 1978 when he appeared on the Parkinson show. Speaking of one teacher whom he had particularly disliked (he diplomatically stopped short of naming him) he said, ‘I was caught for This Is Your Life the other night. I thought, I hope they don’t bring that teacher on because it would be the first punch-in. I feel bitter about it. I think it is one of the things that’s driven me on, because in the back of my mind there’s always this guy saying you will never make anything of your life.’

At one point, it looked more likely that Barry Sheene would become famous as a musical star rather than as a bike racer as he landed a job as an extra in the musical Tosca in Covent Garden, not far from his house. Sheene had been spotted fighting by a teacher who was looking for extras and she’d asked him if he could sing as well as fight. He replied that he could ‘at a push’, auditioned for the part of a scrapping, singing youth, and ended up sharing the stage with world-renowned opera singer Maria Callas. Sheene explained, ‘She [the teacher] was recruiting lads as extras … and another young boy and I were auditioned and given small parts in the first act to scrap in a churchyard scene. Being cast as a singing, fighting hooligan wasn’t altogether at odds with the way I behaved in real life! Sharing the stage with Tito Gobbi and Maria Callas at such a famous place became one of my most vivid childhood memories. I even had to sing. Best part of it was it meant getting off school.’

To escape the misery of school when he wasn’t treading the boards, Barry would often sneak off behind the bike sheds to chain-smoke cigarettes. It seems incredible that someone with chronic asthma would want to smoke, but Barry had taken up the habit when he was just nine years old. Most parents would have been horrified to catch their child smoking, although to be fair on Mr and Mrs Sheene attitudes towards smoking have changed markedly since the fifties and sixties; when Frank caught Barry at it when he was 11, he simply handed him two Woodbines (extremely strong, non-filter cigarettes) and said that if Barry could finish them off he was free to smoke. Fifteen minutes later, Barry was free to smoke. He was soon openly sharing his cigarettes with his family. Years later, his greatest joy having returned to the paddock was his first post-race cigarette. ‘For no other reason than for the sheer pleasure it brings, my first priority upon dumping the bike in the pits is to have a cigarette,’ he said. ‘I might have had my last drag on the start line [through the hole drilled in his helmet’s chin bar] but I crave one immediately I’ve finished the race, not as a means of calming the nerves but simply because it has been over an hour since my last one. For a heavy smoker like myself, that’s a long time!’

Drinking, however, was never one of his vices, although he was as prone to getting carried away on nights out as the next man, and he did once take sadistic pleasure in getting a schoolfriend drunk during a lunch break in what has become one of the most often-repeated stories from Sheene’s childhood. Barry plied his hapless chum with a concoction of spirits from his father’s drinks cabinet before dragging him back to the classroom to observe the effects. His friend was so intoxicated that he needed to be rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped. Sheene, not surprisingly, thought he was in for big trouble when his parents were called in to school to see the headmaster, but Frank was his usual laid-back self, dropping cigarette ash all over the headmaster’s pristine carpet as he explained his son’s actions by resignedly announcing that ‘Boys will be boys.’

Barry first got drunk at the Isle of Man TT in 1960 when he was only 10 years old after guzzling two glasses of champagne given to him by Gary Hocking, who had just finished second in the Junior TT. The experience was enough to put him off touching another drop of alcohol until he was 16. Even after that he claimed he never became a heavy drinker, although he did later develop a passion for fine wines and took great pride in his well-stocked cellar.

Girls were another matter altogether. Perhaps because he’d come so close to losing his manhood as a child, Barry seemed determined to put it to good use as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It finally did over a snooker table in the crypt of a local church when Barry was 14, with a girl whose name he could never remember. From that point on he never looked back. He’d eventually become so famous for his womanizing that he would make front-page news after being photographed leaving a nightclub with a new date, and he would also be selected as a judge for the Miss World contest.

But whatever mischief Barry got up to in his youth, he never rebelled against his parents. The Sheene family was a very tight-knit unit and it stayed that way throughout Barry’s racing career, with Frank helping on the bikes and Iris keeping hot food and drinks flowing for the family and their guests. Barry never treated his parents with anything other than full respect, though he often fought with his elder sister Maggie. ‘Team Sheene’ would become legendary round the paddocks of the world, Frank and Iris providing all the back-up their boy needed when he was racing bikes. The trio were practically inseparable.

Unlike some parents who attempt to live out their own unfulfilled dreams through their children, Frank never pushed Barry into riding motorcycles, but then he didn’t have to. When he offered the five-year-old Barry a motorcycle, the youngster jumped at the chance, like most boys would. The bike was a damaged 50cc Ducati that Frank had rebuilt, and Barry spent hours riding around the spacious back yard of the Royal College of Surgeons on the little four-stroke single, driving the neighbours to distraction. The machine actually had two gears, but Barry, not knowing how to change gears, only ever used one. It was still good enough to reach speeds of around 50mph.

Ironically, it wasn’t hurtling around on a motorcycle which caused Barry’s first serious injury; it was a pushbike accident at the age of eight which resulted in a broken arm. After the arm was plastered, Sheene told his mother that he’d always wanted to break his arm (again, like most schoolboys) and was well chuffed with his plaster trophy.

The little Ducati was eventually replaced by a 100cc Triumph Tiger Cub which Barry took to race meetings so he could potter around in the nearby fields, of which there wasn’t an abundance in central London. He had tried riding the Tiger round the roads near his home but a couple of run-ins with the law had put an end to that, even though the coppers had taken it easy on Barry as they regularly utilized Frank’s services for repair work. When he wasn’t riding his own bike, Barry would take his dad’s race bikes out for short test runs at disused airfields or racing paddocks, all the time developing his skill for analysing how the bikes were running. Sheene’s developmental and analytical skills became finely honed during these years, and they played a big part in his success. But that was no real surprise when one considers that he could strip and rebuild an engine by the age of 12 and was riding real racing motorcycles when his class-mates were still mastering the art of pedalling. Barry recalled getting plenty of snotty looks as a kid when he suggested to puzzled and frustrated riders in the paddock what might be wrong with their bikes just by listening to them being revved. But those who were modest enough to take his advice usually found (probably to their amazement) that the advice was good. Indeed, Sheene became quite the little paddock consultant for any rider whose ego was willing to accommodate the fact that a child knew more about engine mechanics than he did.

Frank Sheene’s bikes were among the best in the country in the sixties and were in demand by many of the top racers of that era, and Barry was fast catching his father up on technical know-how. So much so that by the time he was 14 he was a good enough mechanic to be offered a job looking after race bikes, even though it didn’t pay. But for someone who hated school as much as Barry did the opportunity must have felt like a dream come true: he was asked if he would like to spend a month working as a mechanic in Europe for American Grand Prix racer Tony Woodman. Needless to say, he didn’t have to be asked twice. Frank, fully approving of what he saw as a unique chance for his son to see something of the world and to gain work experience while other kids were stuck in school only reading about foreign lands, gave his son £15 for the month to cover all expenses from food, drink and cigarettes to ferry fares. It was a very modest sum, even in 1964, but Barry, showing a thriftiness that would later become a hallmark, managed to return from the trip with change in his pocket. His parents signed him off school for a month, blaming another bout of illness.

There were few luxuries available and food was scarce, but it was an incredible experience for a boy of 14 and an invaluable insight into the Grand Prix world he would soon come to dominate. And the fact that Woodman was not there just to make up the GP numbers but was a genuine contender made Sheene’s position even more remarkable, a real testament to the skills he had acquired. The trip, which embraced visits to the Salzburgring and the Nurburgring for the Austrian and German GPs, went well. Barry could not have had much interest in returning to school after such an eye-opener, but he still had one year to complete before being officially allowed to leave so he got on with it as best he could. Woodman, incidentally, was later paralysed after breaking his back in the North West 200 road races in Northern Ireland. It was a harsh reminder, if Sheene needed one, that racing motorcycles is a risky business, but at that point Barry showed no signs of wanting to race anyway. Like his father, he was more than happy working on bikes instead of riding them.

His final year at school completed, Sheene was at last free to try his luck in the world at large. He left formal education without a single qualification to his name and in the knowledge that the only thing he’d topped at school was the absenteeism list. But one good thing, aside from Barry’s utter relief, came from leaving school: his asthma attacks all but disappeared. They had always been made considerably worse when Barry was stressed or emotionally upset, and he felt there was no mystery attached to their clearing up almost as soon as he left school: it was a sure measure of how much he had dreaded that establishment. He couldn’t have been happier when it was time to turn his back on it for good.

It seemed obvious from his early-learned hatred of authority that Barry wasn’t going to settle comfortably into just any old job under any old boss. As he said, ‘I had never experienced working for someone other than Frank and I wasn’t quite sure how I would take to someone giving me orders.’ But with no formal qualifications, he wasn’t going to be offered many decent jobs either. Deep down, however, both Sheene and his parents knew that his profound mechanical knowledge would somehow see him through. Frank had taught him all he needed to know about stripping and rebuilding engines, about how to squeeze every last ounce of power out of a motorcycle. Surely that knowledge alone would stand him in good stead?

But being a mechanic didn’t seem to be top of Barry’s job-hunting list. In fact, initially he didn’t have a clue what he wanted to do, and he soon found himself drifting in and out of jobs like most young people trying to find their feet in the world. Eventually he landed a job in a car spares warehouse unloading parts into different bins. The work was neither glamorous nor stimulating, and it paid a measly £5 a week, of which Barry pocketed just 75 shillings after paying tax and national insurance. Needless to say, he didn’t stick at the job for long. Within a few months he had moved on to a new position which was infinitely more exciting and one small step closer to his destiny: he became a motorcycle despatch rider.

Having failed his bike test first time round because the number plate fell off his machine (in his 1976 book The Story So Far, Sheene wrote that he took his test on a 75cc Derbi, but in 2001 he claimed it was on a BSA Bantam), Barry passed at his second attempt, although he told Bike magazine years later that ‘In no way did it [the bike test] prepare me for the road. Absolutely not. In the same way that shagging your girlfriend in a Transit van does nothing to prepare you for married life.’ Having passed, Sheene was handed a BSA Bantam (which perhaps explains his confusion over which bike he had passed his test on) with which to deliver proofs and copy around London for an advertising agency. His wages jumped up to a healthier £12 a week, and more importantly for the girl-mad young Sheene, he got to meet lots of glamour models.

Needless to say, no motorcycle could be taken back to the Sheene household without Frank giving it the once-over, and the British-built Bantam was no exception. Frank soon had it tweaked and tuned to reach a top speed of 80mph, which, through London traffic at any rate, was about as fast as even Barry Sheene dared to go.

Barry enjoyed his stint as a courier, and no doubt it helped to hone his riding skills since travelling through heavy London traffic at speed is no easy task. But at the time money was more important than job satisfaction, and when a friend offered him more cash for sprucing up second-hand cars for his showroom, Barry gladly accepted.

After eighteen months of valeting cars it was time for another change, and Sheene took to driving a truck around London delivering antique furniture, quite often to television stage-sets. He had to lie about his age to get the job and had to show his prospective employers his dad’s driving licence which included the all-important HGV stamp, but somehow it worked and Barry found himself employed as a truck driver. The only problem was, he couldn’t drive a truck. This shortcoming was compounded when his new boss asked him for a lift in the truck straight after the interview. Sheene thought fast and insisted he had to have some time to check the truck over in the yard before he drove it, him being so safety conscious and all. His boss seemed suitably impressed and sought alternative transport, leaving his relieved new employee to drive round and round a nearby car park, familiarizing himself with the skills required to drive a heavy goods vehicle. Sheene took to the task easily, passed his month’s probation without any problems, and was once more to be seen despatching goods around London, albeit at a much more sedate pace.

Barry had been a competent driver, of cars if not HGVs, long before he passed his driving test first time round at the age of 17 in his father’s Rover 105. At just eight years of age he was driving an Austin Ten round the back yard at the Royal College of Surgeons. He was so small that Frank had had to fix lumps of wood onto the foot pedals. But cars never held a great appeal for Barry. To his mind, they were simply more useful for pulling women than anything else, so the style of his four-wheeled transport was more important than its performance. Most 17-year-old boys would have been delighted to be given a Thames van by their fathers, as Barry was, but he bemoaned the fact that it ‘wasn’t too flash for pussy-pulling’.

Although the young Sheene had his uses for cars, it was bikes that he was instinctively drawn to. After all, he’d been surrounded by them and their racers since birth, and even though in the early part of his youth he harboured no ambitions of being a racer, it seemed almost inevitable that he would at least try his hand at it eventually, if only out of curiosity.

The seeds of Barry’s racing career were sown, albeit indirectly, during a trip to Spain when he was eight years old. In 1958 Frank took his son to see the then-famous Barcelona 24-Hour race at Montjuich Park, and during the trip Frank introduced himself to Francesco Bulto, the head of Spanish bike manufacturer Bultaco. The two soon became friends, and it was this friendship that eventually led to Barry’s racing debut. Through Señor Bulto, Frank managed to secure a place on the first racing Bultaco to come into Britain, and he actually won a race on it first time out at the now defunct Crystal Palace circuit. Frank was suitably impressed with the capabilities of the machinery, and from that point onwards he received two new factory models at the beginning of each year to set up for other riders to race. During that 1958 trip, Bulto had allowed Barry to sit on one of his bikes and showed him how to change gears for the first time. He also reportedly told Barry that one day he would ride a factory Bultaco for him. Although he was no doubt simply humouring the child, his prediction came true fewer than ten years later when Barry made his racing debut at Brands Hatch on one of Bulto’s factory machines.

Throughout his childhood and youth, Barry had accompanied his dad to race meetings almost every weekend during the summer; if Frank wasn’t going to be attending a race or a practice day for whatever reason, young Barry would scrounge a lift from one of the many racers he had got to know in the paddock. Before he ever turned a wheel in anger, Barry Sheene was a paddock institution who could be seen either offering technical advice to riders or just generally mucking in by carrying tyres, working stopwatches or cleaning bikes. He was, quite literally, born to the paddock.

He had, for example, worked on Chas Mortimer’s bikes when Mortimer was racing them for Frank. Chas went on to win eight Isle of Man TTs and had a successful career in GPs and in British championships, as well as being Sheene’s team-mate at Yamaha in Grands Prix in 1972. ‘Barry worked for me as my mechanic when I rode for his father Frank in, I think, 1967,’ Mortimer recalled. ‘I did a few meetings in the UK on his 125 and 250cc Bultacos. Barry was quite good with the spanners even then, he always has been. I remember he used to run my bikes in for me when he was a young, long-haired youth living in Holborn. Franco and Barry used to work on the bikes in the workshop there; well, Barry would work on the bikes and Franco would be doing the talking, the team manager bit.’ Mortimer thought that the fundamentals of the characteristics which later made Sheene famous were already in place in the late sixties. ‘Barry was always quite outspoken, he was quite a precocious boy. He got his reputation with the women from right early on, and I remember when he was 14 he was smoking 30 fags a day – breaking the filters off the ends, of course.’

Multiple British champion John ‘Moon Eyes’ Cooper – so called because of the trademark eyes painted on his helmet – also remembered Sheene around the racing scene as a youngster. ‘I’ve known Franco for about 50 years,’ he said. ‘I never rode his bikes but he was always about the paddocks, riding at first then tuning bikes for other riders. Barry was always around too. When he was about 15 he used to come and stay at my house with a racer called Dave Croxford because he was helping Dave a bit at the races.’ Croxford was just one of a long list of riders who raced Frank Sheene’s bikes, and the young Barry would not only help him with the spanners, he would also be constantly absorbing valuable information from everything he saw and heard around him. ‘I’d watch the blokes on dad’s bikes [and] note how they would handle them,’ he explained, ‘listen for anything that sounded off-song. I certainly knew how an engine worked even then. While other lads would know who played outside-left for Arsenal, I could explain the principles of a two-stroke motor.’

In early 1968, Sheene experienced an even more direct involvement with racing, this time on the other side of the armco. Frank had just received his usual allotment of Bultacos – a 125cc machine and a 250cc bike – for the coming season. After stripping and rebuilding them to his own particular specifications, as every bike tuner does, he asked Barry to run them in for him at Brands Hatch. He knew his son would be mechanically sympathetic during the running-in process and he also knew that as Barry wouldn’t be out to prove anything on the track there was little chance of him crashing the precious bikes before they were even raced. Besides, there was no one else available at the time. Little could the pair have known that that inauspicious track debut would lead to one of the most glittering careers in motorcycling history.

Although Barry insisted that his dad never forced him into his track debut, it’s tempting to think he must have been at least a little curious to see how his boy would go round a circuit even if Barry didn’t seem too desperate to find out for himself. He hadn’t shown much competitive spirit at school or in his early jobs, so why should things be any different now?

Barry’s competitive career had actually started in trials riding some years before. Trials is a sport where riders negotiate near-impossible obstacles such as logs, barrels and rock faces at very low, often dead-stop speeds. The emphasis is on precise throttle control and balance, and as such it’s a good way for riders to hone their skills. The only problem was that it didn’t involve speed, and Sheene liked his speed. Despite this, Barry had shown promise in the early stages of most of the events he entered, but he struggled to maintain enough interest and concentration in the sport to make further progress. He was more engaged by the ground between the marked-out sections on the course where he could indulge in sudden bursts of speed and practise the wheelies he’d later become renowned for. In the end, it just wasn’t the sport for him. Road racing, however, was to prove a different matter entirely; it was to be the sport for which Barry had an innate aptitude.

Running in a racing motorcycle, like running in anything else, is a progressive business. It’s all about getting some steady miles on the clock to ensure everything is bedded in correctly before the machine is thrashed near to death by whoever races it. Even so, there was an inherent danger in the exercise for Sheene because every one of Frank’s new Bultacos in the past had seized on their initial outings. In other words, the engines had locked solid in mid-flight, and that usually ends with the rider being thrown off the bike unless his reactions are quick enough to allow him to pull the clutch in and freewheel to a standstill. This time round, the bikes didn’t seize. Barry found he’d actually enjoyed himself riding round the same track on which he’d watched his heroes racing for so many years. Brands Hatch, situated to the south-east of London, was Sheene’s ‘home’ track. He’d been there countless times and was familiar with the famous corners like Paddock Hill Bend, Druids and Clearways.

As things turned out, the day’s testing went so smoothly that Frank asked Barry to do some further bedding-in the following week. By that point the bikes had some miles under their belts and Barry was able to pick up the revs and push a good bit harder. He was also much more familiar with the track layout, the correct lines to take and the whole race-track environment, all of which is very alien to beginners. Being let loose on a circuit where there’s no cars, trucks or buses coming the other way, no speed limits, no mirrors on your bike and no restrictions or guides as to where you should position yourself on the road takes a bit of getting used to, even if you are Barry Sheene. But by the second weekend of testing, Barry was looking like he’d been born to it, and the fact didn’t go unnoticed. Reports from trackside marshals started to filter back to Frank that his son was looking a bit handy out there on the Bultacos; in fact, he looked faster than many racers those same marshals had seen. Maybe Barry should try his hand at racing? Frank related the news to his son, and Barry admitted to letting the praise go to his head. He readily agreed that maybe the time was right to carry on the family racing tradition and get out on the track in anger for the first time.

It was March 1968 and Sheene was 17 years old when he lined up on the starting grid, his gangly figure dwarfing the little 125cc Bultaco, for his first ever race. By today’s standards that’s pretty old – Valentino Rossi, for example, was a world champion at the same age in 1997 – but back in the late sixties it was more in keeping with the norm. It was an impressive debut by anyone’s standards. Sheene had worked his way up to second place in the race and was threatening the leader Mike Lewis when it all went wrong: the Bultaco seized, as it had never done during the running-in period, and spat its rider off over the handlebars. It wasn’t Barry’s fault in any way, but his detractors have often sniggered over the fact that Sheene crashed in his very first race. Indeed, that first race established a pattern that was to become all too familiar for Barry Sheene: being on the edge of glory just moments before a fall.

James Wilson was having only the second outing of his racing career that day on a 204cc Elite-engined Ducati. He recalled, ‘I remember I went up the inside of Sheene at Druids on one lap then went down through Southbank, and then bang, my clutch went and Barry came flying past me. His Bultaco was very quick, but then he locked up as well and crashed, although it wasn’t a bad one. The van took us back to the paddock together and we nattered in the van quite a bit. There was none of this “I’m a hero” kind of stuff. I knew about Barry from the paddock; he was the guy with the long blond hair who was always having a laugh and smoking a fag. He looked like a bloody good rider even back then; he really stood out. I mean, I stood out as well, but I had no help at all while Barry had his mum and dad, his sister and a van filled with all the right stuff. He didn’t have loads of money but he had enough, and he had a wealth of experience because of his family background. I was envious, not jealous, of the help Barry had. I knew then that he was going somewhere because he could ride and he had the right back-up as well.’ Wilson also remembered Sheene drawing attention to himself in the paddock that day, one of the few times anyone can remember him being violent. ‘I remember he punched the lights out of somebody that day because they owed money to Franco. I don’t know if he ever got the money but I doubt if the guy ever went near Barry again.’

Money aside, Frank Sheene must have been wondering what he’d got his son into when he learned that Barry had banged his head quite badly, lost some skin off his hands and cut his lip. Protective racing gear in the late sixties was extremely primitive compared to modern helmets, leathers, gloves and boots; a rider would probably be completely unscathed if he had a similar crash today. As it was, Sheene displayed admirable courage by ignoring his injuries and any psychological effects of the crash, and by refusing to be carted off by the circuit ambulance to hospital for a check-up. Instead he lined up to take part in the 250cc race on his other Bultaco.

Frank hadn’t wanted Barry to go back out again, but, showing the guts and determination that would eventually make him famous, he went out and finished third in the first event he ever completed. In a way, that first race day was a microcosm of Sheene’s career. He rode well, crashed, ignored his injuries and came back to finish strongly, both defiant and jubilant. He proved right from the start that he wasn’t a quitter.

A rostrum position for his first-day’s racing was a great achievement, but an even better result wasn’t very far away. Just one week later, and again at Brands Hatch, Barry took his first race win, and he did it in style by an incredible 12 seconds. And the best was yet to come. Frank had a special 250 Bultaco he had bored out to a larger 280cc capacity, and he wanted to know how it would compare against the machines in the 350 race. As things turned out, the bike didn’t compare – it totally dominated. Beaming with pride, Frank watched his son, and his project bike, finish half a lap ahead of the rest of the field, Barry romping home to take his second victory of the day.

Sheene junior was ecstatic. He might have been shaking with excitement after his first race win, but second time round he was completely overjoyed. Having proved to any doubters that his first victory was no fluke, he suddenly found himself the centre of attention in the paddock as members of the press and fellow racers gathered round to congratulate him. Keener paddock observers realized that the gangly Londoner wearing a cheeky smile from ear to ear was a star in the making. Those who didn’t take notice soon would, because Barry Sheene had finally arrived and motorcycle racing would never be the same again.

CHAPTER 2 THE RACER: PART ONE

‘He was it. He was the main man who everyone had to beat.’

RON HASLAM

After scoring such a resounding double victory in only his second-ever race meeting, in April 1968 Barry Sheene surprised many people by opting out of racing for a few months. Still unconvinced that racing was the proper career path to follow, he decided to take in a second tour of Europe, this time spannering for a rider called Lewis Young. Young was riding Bultacos, which by now Barry knew inside out, and he wisely came to the conclusion that a season following the Grand Prix circus around Europe would teach him more about the motorcycle racing business than a few weekends spent hurtling round British circuits. It might have seemed at the time an odd move to make, but it proved to be a well-judged one. This time, Barry really laid the foundations for his future career by getting to know all the circuits, the travelling routines and the way of life in the paddock, as well as gaining countless contacts all of whom would play a part in his future. The experience was heady and intoxicating, and by the time he returned to England that autumn not only was he 10kg lighter after eating so sparsely and irregularly, he had also decided to race again. Having seen some of the lesser lights who were competing in the Grands Prix, Barry had become convinced that he could beat most of them.

The year 1969 was Barry Sheene’s first full season of racing, and for the job in hand he had three Bultacos (125, 250 and 350cc), all immaculately prepared by himself and Frank. His Ford Thames van wasn’t quite so immaculate but it was good enough for the job. By the end of it he was being celebrated as the best newcomer of the season, having finished second to and 16 points behind established British rider Chas Mortimer in the 125cc British Championship. ‘I seem to remember that I won the 125 British Championship quite early on that year,’ Mortimer recalled, ‘then I went on to do some Grands Prix while Barry finished off the championship.’

That season very nearly became Sheene’s first and last when his hero and friend Bill Ivy was killed during practice for the East German Grand Prix in July. Sheene was devastated and suffered a massive asthma attack upon hearing the news. He hadn’t had a relapse since leaving school, and he never had another again. He seriously considered packing in the racing game after Bill’s death, but eventually managed to come to terms with the tragedy, as all motorcycle racers must do; it had to be chalked down as an accident and life had to go on. Sheene persisted, and went on to become Bill’s natural successor in the paddocks of the world, the cheeky cockney rebel with a playboy lifestyle and a gift for flamboyancy. Ivy would have been proud of him.

It was his natural flamboyancy that led Sheene to design the most famous crash helmet in motorcycle racing history, and it grabbed lots of attention during the 1969 season. While most other riders wore very basic designs on their helmets, if any at all, Barry had Donald Duck emblazoned on the front of his in a bid to attract attention to himself. It worked, and as the design developed over the years it became the most recognizable in the sport. The completed item featured a black background with gold trimmings, the famous number seven on the sides (more of which later) and, for the first time ever in the sport, the rider’s name on the back. ‘It wasn’t intentional,’ Sheene explained. ‘My helmet had gone away to a chap I knew to be painted and it came back with my name emblazoned on the rear. That’s neat, I thought, and I know I turned many heads when I unveiled it for the first time.’ Over the next few decades it became almost compulsory for riders to have their names on the backs of their helmets, and Barry claimed he was the originator of the fashion.

And his fashion sense didn’t stop at helmet designs; he also helped instigate the long-overdue decline in the use of all-black leathers which had so tarnished the image of motorcycle racing. In the twenty-first century motorcycle racing is one of the most colourful sports on the calendar, but it wasn’t always the case, far from it in fact, and Sheene played a large part in the technicolour transformation. In 1972 he ordered a set of white leathers, again largely as a gimmick to get noticed but also as a way of improving the sport’s then drab, greasy image of rough men in black leathers riding noisy, smelly motorbikes. He wasn’t the first rider to brighten up the sport, however, and not everyone was blown away by his garb, as Chas Mortimer testified. ‘I don’t particularly remember Barry’s Donald Duck helmet and white leathers standing out in those days. I mean, I had white leathers then too. Rod Scivyer was the first person to wear them in about 1967 or 1968.’ Sheene would later ditch the white colour scheme believing it was a step too far, but he would go on to wear other brightly coloured leathers such as the famous blue and white Suzuki garments and the even more famous red and black Texaco outfit.

With the trauma of Bill Ivy’s death behind him, Sheene set about preparing for the 1970 season with a team set-up and determination as yet unseen. The icing on the cake was the purchase of an ex-factory 125cc Suzuki from retired rider Stuart Graham. It cost a whopping £2,000, which was an enormous sum at the time and certainly out of Barry’s reach without the help of his dad. Barry used every penny he had to secure the bike – he was still driving a lorry for up to 14 hours a day to raise funds – and borrowed the rest from Frank, though he insisted he paid every penny back.

He made a point of letting everyone know that he repaid his father because he had always been acutely aware of the perception that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth when it came to racing. After all, he’d had two factory Bultacos for his first outing, a world-class tuner in his dad and, through his father’s connections, advice from some of the best riders in the world. Ron Haslam, who began to challenge Barry’s supremacy on the domestic scene in the mid-seventies, recalled Barry’s machinery advantage. ‘He was it. He was the main man who everyone had to beat. I was helping my brother [Terry Haslam, who was killed racing in 1974] who was beating him sometimes even though he didn’t have all the tackle Sheene had. Sheene had factory bikes from the start so it was such a big thing for my brother to beat him on lesser machinery.’ Ron himself struggled against Barry on ‘lesser machinery’ on many occasions; whenever he came out on top it was always sweetly satisfying. ‘Sheene was like any rider in that he thought he was the best, as I did. You have to think that. He had superior equipment but he was still beatable, and I always believed I could beat him.’

Barry knew that his little ten-speed Suzuki was fast enough to run at World Championship level, and that’s exactly where he intended to be for his third year of racing – a feat almost unheard of in the modern Grand Prix world. Having won his first race on the Suzuki at Mallory Park, Sheene became so dominant on it in Britain that year that he later left it at home and raced the Bultaco instead. It appeared to be an extremely sporting gesture but was, in essence, more of a shrewd financial move: the Suzuki was much too precious to risk in British rounds when it wasn’t needed, and Barry couldn’t afford to be faced with astronomical spares bills should he crash the bike or damage it in any way. The Suzuki was, however, the weapon of choice for the last Grand Prix of the season in Spain, which also happened to be Barry’s first. He had already wrapped up the 1970 125cc British Championship for his first-ever title and decided he needed to up the stakes as far as the competition went if he was to continue on his steep learning curve.

John Cooper remembered watching – sometimes from trackside, sometimes on the track – as the young Sheene progressed. ‘Initially Barry was like everyone else. He came up through the ranks in 125s and 250s, but he was always a good rider. At one point I had a 250cc Yamsel [a Yamaha engine in a Seeley frame] and he had a 250 and 350cc Yamaha so we often raced each other and he used to say to me, “I wish you’d bloody pack up and give me a chance.”’ Sheene didn’t get his chance until 1973 when Cooper retired after almost 20 years of racing. ‘Barry’s career just overlapped mine. When I finished racing he became really good. But he did ride my Yamsel a few times in the early seventies if I wasn’t using it just because it was a particularly good bike. He couldn’t beat me when I was on it really because his bikes were fairly standard at the time, but then he got the works Suzuki 500 and by then I had packed up and Barry just went from strength to strength.’

One week before that Spanish Grand Prix, Barry entered a big Spanish International event and actually managed to beat the current World Championship leader, the Spaniard Angel Nieto, to the great displeasure of the partisan crowd. It’s worth noting that big one-off international race meetings for bikes have now all but disappeared, but in the seventies there were many big-money meets which attracted all the best riders, and a win in one of those was equivalent to a Grand Prix win by virtue of the fact that all the GP competitors were entered in the race. They were also financially profitable, as Sheene explained in the 1975 Motor Cycle News annual. ‘At a Grand Prix, I could make between £200 and £500 for one start, but at a non-championship meeting in France, say, I could ask for over £2,000 – and get it.’ The risk of injury in non-world championship events eventually heralded their demise in the eighties; for sponsors, manufacturers, riders and teams, the World Championship had to come first and they actively discouraged their contracted riders from taking part in any other events.

Sheene’s Spanish win was just what he needed before making his Grand Prix debut, and only a small misjudgement in the setting up of his bike robbed him of the chance of winning that race too. He had been only half a second slower than Nieto in practice despite never having ridden the Montjuich Park circuit before, but his bike was slightly undergeared and Nieto won by eight seconds, with Barry a huge 40 seconds ahead of the third-placed rider Bo Jansson. It was a sensational debut, and also the start of a great friendship between Sheene and Nieto, who would play a big part in helping Barry learn Spanish. He later learned to speak Italian and French as well, to varying levels of fluency, allowing him both to read what was written about him in the bike press of those countries and to conduct interviews with their media – always a popularity booster when very few Brits bothered to learn a second language. Sheene’s Japanese was not as good, but it too proved invaluable over the years when dealing with his Japanese employers Suzuki and Yamaha and their respective mechanics.

Sheene also had his first ride in the premier 500cc class at the Spanish Grand Prix that weekend, although his debut cannot be taken too seriously. Up against the mighty 500cc MV Agustas, Barry pitched his little (albeit overbored) 280cc Bultaco just for a bit of fun. Even so, he managed to work his way into second place in the race before the Bultaco seized, putting an end to his efforts. Barry’s first ride on a real 500cc bike came at Snetterton that same year when he raced a crash-damaged Suzuki 500 his father had pieced back together. For once, though, Barry didn’t have superior machinery, and it showed as he failed to set the world on fire and eventually retired from the race, but it was a start, and it marked the first time he’d ridden the kind of bike that would make him world famous.

With 1970 delivering the 125cc British Championship, a third place in the 250cc British series and a podium finish in his first Grand Prix, it was decided that nothing less than a full-on assault on the World Championship would suffice in 1971. The amount of travel and mechanical preparation required for such an effort necessitated Barry quitting all his little odd-jobs. From that point on, for better or worse, he would have to survive on whatever start money he could negotiate and whatever prize money he could win. He would be racing for survival.

Motorcycle Grand Prix racing today is a world of glamour and big money: multi-million-pound transporters and hospitality suites, worldwide television coverage, hosts of glamour girls pouting and posing their way through the paddock, luxury motorhomes for the riders to relax in and even more luxurious pay cheques with which to buy them. But in 1971 it couldn’t have been more different, especially for a newcomer like the 20-year-old Barry Sheene. Sheene himself would later play a leading role in adding such glamour to international paddocks, but his first full season was, as for most racers, a rough and ready, hand-to-mouth experience. There were no first-class flights to the far-off rounds; instead, Sheene and his mechanic Don Mackay took turns to drive Sheene’s newly acquired Ford Transit around Europe. Luxury hotels and restaurants were still some way off too, so the van doubled up as accommodation and kitchen – at least it did when there was something to cook, which for most of the time there wasn’t. Don was paid a wage as and when Sheene won any prize money, and a meal in a restaurant was a rare treat if the team had done particularly well. Sheene might have been the source of some envy in UK paddocks when he turned up with ultra-competitive bikes, but when it came to Grand Prix racing he was no more privileged than any other privateer.

Money was so tight at times that desperate and innovative measures were called for just to keep the show on the road. Sheene recalled a time when he had to ‘borrow’ some red diesel from a cement mixer in West Germany so that he could make it to Austria. When he got there, he asked the race organizer to up his starting fee from £30 a race because he needed money for food for the coming weeks. When the organizer refused on the grounds that no one knew who Barry Sheene was, Sheene offered a unique solution: if he could qualify in the top three in each of his three classes, he would be paid £50 each time; if he couldn’t, he would be paid only £20. The organizer, thinking he could save some cash, agreed, but he’d seriously underestimated Barry’s talents. Sheene got his £150.

Financial hardship aside, the year went remarkably well, Barry scoring a third place on the 125cc Suzuki at the first Grand Prix in Austria. He was also on the pace in the 250 and 350cc classes, but mechanical gremlins robbed him of any more finishes, as they did in West Germany, too. A look at the results sheets of Sheene or any other rider from that era will show just how many mechanical breakdowns a rider typically suffered in a season. To a modern-day GP enthusiast this will seem inexcusable; after all, aren’t top Grand Prix mechanics paid handsomely to prevent just such occurrences? Breakdowns are now so rare as to be a real talking point among paddock pundits and the press, but in the seventies they were still commonplace. Reliability has improved massively in the three decades since Sheene first hit the Grand Prix trail, and the money now being thrown at teams allows them to replace parts much more regularly, further lessening the chances of any technological mishaps. While Sheene might have suffered an apparently high number of mechanical hiccups, other riders did so too, so it all balanced out over the course of a season. The old points system, where riders could drop an allocated number of their worst results, further helped to create an even playing field.

The potential dangers of mechanical problems increased considerably when the GP circus travelled to the unforgiving public-roads course that was the Isle of Man TT, Britain’s round of the World Championship at the time, and a place Sheene learned very quickly to hate. The TT had started in 1907, and Barry had enjoyed the meet as a young spectator and paddock helper. Riding it, though, was a different matter altogether. The course is unique in that it is 37.74 miles long and lined with walls, houses, lamp-posts and every other hazard you’d expect to find on normal rural and urban public roads. Grand Prix circuits in the seventies were still nowhere near as safe as they are now, but they were a lot safer than the TT course, if only because they were shorter and easier to learn. In 1971, Sheene decided to race on the Isle of Man to try to score some valuable points for his world title campaign. It was a move that would define Sheene’s views on the event and make him many enemies among traditionalists who continued to support the TT despite its perils.

Those traditionalists have always scoffed at the fact that Sheene crashed out of his first race there, but he’d actually been on the leaderboard before the incident. He posted the third fastest time in practice on his 125cc Suzuki and was leading the race at one point on the opening lap until he hit thick fog and eased off the throttle. When his overworked clutch bit too hard just after the start of the second lap, Sheene was tossed from his bike at the slow, first-gear Quarterbridge corner and his race was run – much to Barry’s relief, as he’d been hating every minute of it. But that wasn’t quite the end of Sheene’s TT career: he still had an outing in the production event on a 250cc Suzuki. Again, he posted respectable times in practice, but after suffering a massive tankslapper (or ‘speed wobble’, as it was more quaintly referred to at the time), during which the front end of the bike shakes viciously from side to side, parts of his machine started to work themselves loose and Barry pulled in after just one lap. He never raced on the Island again.

A rider’s decision not to race at the TT would never normally cause any kind of commotion; it is a free world after all, and no one forces racers to take part in the TT. But Sheene wasn’t content just to stay away from the island. Over the next few years he embarked upon a sustained one-man attack on the event and played a major role in the TT eventually being stripped of its World Championship status – a crime for which some have never forgiven him.

Racing fanatics fall into one of two camps over the whole Sheene/TT issue: if you love the TT, you hate Barry Sheene, and if you hate the TT, you tend to agree with Sheene’s actions. Barry’s major bone of contention was that riders shouldn’t be asked to race on such a dangerous track just to gain championship points. He never wanted the TT to be banned as such, he just wanted riders to have the choice of whether or not to race there, his thinking being that when valuable points are at stake riders may be tempted to push their luck to earn a few. TT supporters claimed that the throttle works both ways and riders can take things as easy as they want to, thereby reducing the dangers. Many supporters of the event have said that Barry was just too scared to race there, or that he couldn’t be bothered to spend the usual three years to learn the course well enough to win on it. The second argument falls down when you consider that Sheene was leading his first race there before he crashed, and Barry himself responded to the first accusation: ‘The Mountain [TT] circuit did not frighten me in any way. No circuit frightens me. I just couldn’t see the sense of riding around in the pissing rain completely on your own against a clock. It wasn’t racing to my mind.’

Don Morley, a professional photographer and journalist since 1955 and one of the most respected photographers in the business, has a different take on Sheene’s aversion to the TT. Morley has probably taken more pictures of Sheene than anyone else and was always privy to the gossip and chatter in the paddocks of the racing world. ‘Barry made a bit of a name for himself slagging off the TT, but it was more to do with money than the dangers of the place,’ he said. ‘A normal Grand Prix lasted three days whereas the TT was a two-week event and it cost the riders an awful lot of money to compete there. There was very little prize money and it was awkward for the GP riders to get to the Isle of Man from the Continent. They had to drive to a port, get a ferry to England, drive again and then get another ferry to the Isle of Man which was a lot more difficult than just driving from the Spanish GP to the French GP, for example. Then they had to pay for a hotel for two weeks instead of just three days as well as all the other expenses. It was good for the organizers, but not the riders. This was in the days before lots of long-haul Grands Prix, and it just didn’t make financial sense.’

In 1972 Giacomo Agostini, who won 10 TTs and 15 World Championship titles, joined Barry’s protest after his close friend Gilberto Parlotti was killed on his TT debut. Ago said he would never race there again, and he kept his word. He was joined by Phil Read, though five years later he changed his mind and did race there again. The event was finally struck from the Grand Prix calendar after 1976, much to Sheene’s approval.

Sheene’s name was dragged up in the press for more than a decade whenever there were calls for the TT to be banned outright, and to this day there is still a lot of resentment among TT fans towards him. But it’s worth remembering that while Sheene hated riding at the TT (‘Why bother when it’s so much easier just to shoot yourself and get it all over with?’), it didn’t stop him racing on other pure road cricuits, most notably Oliver’s Mount in Scarborough, a treacherous, narrow and bumpy parkland circuit. And many Grand Prix circuits such as Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium and Imatra in Finland were armco-lined pure road circuits too.

Certainly Sheene’s criticism of the TT circuit ran somewhat in contradiction to his view on these other dangerous circuits, a fact he attempted to explain in Leader of the Pack. In justifying his decision to continue racing at the Oliver’s Mount track, he said, ‘As with any other circuit, if there are sections which you can’t tackle with confidence, it’s up to you to ride through those sections at the pace best suited to you. You can make up for lost time in other stretches, where there is less likelihood of hurting yourself.’ Surely that same theory could apply to the TT circuit as well as any other?

Mick Grant, himself a seven-times TT winner and a staunch supporter of the event, was one of Barry’s fiercest rivals in the seventies. He testified to Sheene’s abilities on road circuits despite his aversion to the TT. ‘Although Barry knocked the TT, we never actually spoke about it together. My regret with Barry was that he didn’t continue with the TT. Certainly the way he rode on pure road circuits like Scarborough and Imatra, there was no way that he couldn’t have done the TT. I mean, bloomin’ hell, Scarborough requires all the road racing skills you’d ever need, and he could do it. He certainly wasn’t slow round there.’

Still, from 1971 the Isle of Man was out of his hair for good and Barry was free to concentrate on the next round of the World Championship, to which he travelled in a bit more style – in his newly purchased caravan. To the modern GP follower this will sound more like a club racer’s accommodation, but in 1971 it was the last word in luxury. For some, this was the start of Sheene the poser. Upstart relative newcomers to the GP scene were expected to sleep on the floors of their oily vans rather than tow a caravan around like a wealthy American tourist, but to Sheene it just made practical sense. With a more comfortable bed and an area for cooking some decent food, he would be in better shape for the racing. And if it added to his glamour-boy image and helped to improve standards in the paddock, then so much the better. One thing Sheene certainly wasn’t slow to notice was that having a caravan greatly increased his pulling power with the ladies, and for Barry that fact alone was worth the extra expenditure.

Motorcycle racing on the Continent was huge in the seventies despite the utter dearth of professionalism involved in its organization and the lack of money available to its star performers. More than 150,000 people turned up to watch Sheene being narrowly beaten by Angel Nieto at the Dutch TT in Assen, one of the best-attended rounds on the GP calendar. The next meeting in Belgium got off to a bad start when Sheene was fined for spilling fuel on the track. He had been returning from a night out and was driving down the circuit to get to the paddock when his van ran out of diesel. He managed to bleed the fuel system and top the van back up, but not before sloshing some diesel onto the course. A vigilant Belgian policeman witnessed the incident and Barry was fined the now comedic-sounding sum of £6.60. He also incurred the wrath of his fellow riders who had to negotiate the slippery section of the track. But if the weekend got off to a bad start, it ended in the best possible way with Sheene taking his first-ever Grand Prix victory in the 125cc race. It was made a little hollow by the fact that Nieto had retired on the third lap, but Barry didn’t care; a first win is always a watershed, and he couldn’t have been more delighted. As he recalled, ‘Once I had crossed the finishing line, I could hardly contain myself. I wanted to get drunk, kiss as many girls as I could lay my hands on and just dance with joy. That was the proudest moment of my life up to then.’

A second in the 125 and a sixth place in the 250 race on his Yamaha in the East German Grand Prix were followed by a second GP win, this time in the 50cc class in Czechoslovakia. Kreidler had approached Sheene at the Belgian GP about riding one of their factory bikes to help out their full-time rider, Jan de Vries. For Sheene it was a chance to add to his start and prize money with minimum hassle as the factory team would take care of the bike. Race day didn’t start too well: Barry overslept and was ‘peacefully dreaming about two blondes’ when he was rudely awakened by members of the Kreidler team hammering on his caravan door. Pulling on his leathers and wandering bleary-eyed to the starting grid, Sheene was in no mood to go racing. He’d much rather have been left with his imaginary girlfriends. ‘When [I] set off,’ he recalled, ‘I think I gave a huge yawn; I was still half asleep. But I buzzed round as quick as I could in the wet with my head thumping and my teeth chattering with cold.’ In fact he buzzed round quickly enough to win the race from Nieto, who was by now firmly established as his arch rival no matter what class he seemed to race in.

He was certainly the man Sheene needed to beat in the 125cc class if he was to become the youngest ever Grand Prix world champion, and when Nieto’s bike expired during the Swedish round it began to look likely that Barry might just pull off a shock title win from the Spaniard. When Nieto also retired from the Finnish Grand Prix, Sheene held a 19-point lead with just two rounds to go and was being touted as the champion elect. Unfortunately for Sheene, a non-championship event in Hengello, Holland, then all but ruined his chances: he crashed, breaking his wrist and chipping an ankle. It was Barry’s first bad accident, the first time he had broken a bone while racing, and it’s easy to see now why top Grand Prix riders no longer take part in non-championship events, with the exception of the Suzuka 8-Hour race in Japan which remains massively important to the Japanese manufacturers who call all the shots.

Strapped up and in considerable discomfort, Sheene rode to a highly creditable third place in Italy behind Gilberto Parlotti and Angel Nieto and refused to blame his injuries for his failure to win, saying instead that his bike was simply not fast enough on the day. He remained in the hunt for the title, but it was to be yet another non-title event, the prestigious Mallory Park Race of the Year, that really did put an end to his hopes. It seems incredible that Sheene, having had a warning with his crash in Holland, would contest another race and risk further injury so near to the final round of the World Championship, but it was the norm for the time as well as being the only way riders could make enough money to survive a season. This time Sheene was thrown into a banking when his rear tyre lost traction. He was taken to Leicester Royal Infirmary for a check-up but, despite being in great pain, was discharged after being told he hadn’t broken anything. It was an extremely poor diagnosis: Sheene had in fact broken five ribs and suffered compression fractures to three vertebrae.

Oblivious to the fact, he travelled to Spain to take on Nieto for the final showdown in the world title chase. After again racing the 50cc Kreidler, which broke down on the last lap, Barry stooped over a fountain in the paddock to have a drink of water. That’s when he heard the disconcerting and agonizing ‘ping’ as one of his broken ribs popped out of place and threatened to burst through his skin. Never one to shirk from pain, Barry forced the rib back into place and taped up his torso to hold the offending bone in place long enough to last the race. Just making it to the Jarama start grid was the first of many superhuman efforts shown by Barry Sheene in his pursuit of racing glory. He and Nieto had a fantastic scrap all race long and were heading into the final stages when Barry hit some oil and slid off the Suzuki, his race and World Championship hopes over. After all his painful efforts, he had lost his grip on a title which had been so close because of a patch of oil that should have been cleaned up anyway. The only consolation for Sheene was that he didn’t further aggravate his injuries in the crash.

It might have been a disappointing way to end what had been a great year, one that had delivered 38 race wins, but Sheene didn’t dwell on it for long. Having so nearly taken a world crown at his first attempt, he was confident he could definitely lift one the following year. For the 1972 season, he signed for Yamaha to ride its 250cc and 350cc machines in what was his first season with a factory team. At last he was being paid to go racing. The year started off well, and Sheene picked up his first-ever 500cc class win at the King of Brands meeting over Easter. But that only fuelled his confidence and added to the complacency with which he faced the Grands Prix. Things went wrong from the very first round when both Yamahas suffered mechanical breakdowns. The bikes were both slow and unreliable, and Barry didn’t help matters when he badly broke a collarbone during the Italian Grand Prix. The only highlights of the GP season were a third place in Spain and a fourth place in Austria, both in the 250cc class, and that was hardly a step up from the year before when he’d won four Grand Prix races. Sheene was acutely aware of the fact, too.

Such a disastrous season led to bad feelings between Sheene and his Yamaha team and he was desperate to leave by the end of the year to prove that it had been the bikes and not his riding at fault. These bad feelings would come back to haunt Barry years later when he once again rode a Yamaha. Those same lowly mechanics from the 1972 season had risen up the ranks to become senior personnel by 1980, and whenever he asked for a favour Sheene discovered that they had long memories. Had he kept his views on the 250 Yamaha to himself, or at least confined his criticism of the bike to behind closed doors, there would have been no problem. As it was, he made no secret of what he thought of the bike, and there is no surer way to offend the Japanese corporate psyche. Still, Sheene was prepared to shoulder some of the blame for his worst year to date: ‘That poor year in 1972 taught me a salutary lesson about the dangers of becoming big-headed. Over-confidence was the root of my problems.’

With Sheene’s reputation having taken a bit of a battering, he was really out to prove himself in 1973. He had a new contract with Suzuki and a new championship challenge beckoned: the FIM Formula 750 European Championship, in many ways the predecessor of the current World Superbike Championship. The Formula 750 Championship was, to all intents and purposes, a world championship even though it didn’t enjoy the prestige of being conferred with official world-class status. The calendar of dates was just as gruelling as the Grands Prix, and the calibre of riders almost as impressive.

The new breed of 750cc superbike racing had taken off in America in the early seventies and reports had reached Sheene that Suzuki’s new three-cylinder 750 had been clocked at 183mph in testing – allegedly the fastest speed ever attained by a race bike at that time. Sheene couldn’t wait to get his hands on one. Despite the fact that he had cut his teeth in 125 and 50cc racing, he now referred to the smaller-capacity bikes as being very ‘Mickey Mouse’ and was determined to prove he could win in the world’s largest-capacity racing class on what he considered ‘real men’s bikes’. Sheene duly got a Suzuki triple from the US where his brother-in-law, Paul Smart, would be racing one. Smart had been an arch rival of Sheene’s over the past few years but the pair had continued to have a friendly relationship. Barry had been as pleased as anyone when Paul tied the knot with his sister Maggie at the end of 1971, a marriage that still stands today and which produced current racer Scott Smart, Sheene’s nephew.

When Barry eventually took delivery of his new Suzuki it was immediately apparent to him that it was not the exotic piece of machinery he had been expecting. Much midnight oil was burned as he slotted the engine into a Seeley chassis and rebuilt the bike to a more competitive spec. In the end, his hard work paid off. Despite winning only one round of the eight-round championship, Sheene’s two second places, a third and a fourth meant he accumulated enough points to win the title ahead of Australian Jack Findlay, John Dodds and his own team-mate Stan Woods. Of the remaining rounds, he had two non-finishes and was disqualified from the British round at Silverstone for switching bikes between the two race legs. It was Sheene’s most prestigious championship win to date, and he proved that he really had mastered larger-capacity machines by adding the Motor Cycle News Superbike title, Shellsport 500 title and King of Brands crown to his collection.

Sheene was now really starting to make a name for himself, not only as a racer but as a great PR man and a bit of a grafter, as John Cooper explained: ‘Barry was always a very determined chap. He worked on his bikes a lot and they were always nicely prepared and presented. He used to try hard and he was very professional. Preparation is the thing with bikes, and he was always keen, fiddling about, changing the sprockets, altering the forks and the springs – not like today when riders just come in the paddock and dump their bikes on their mechanics. He wasn’t shy of grafting. Years later I used to go down to his house when he lived at Charlwood and all his spanners were laid out neatly in his workshop and his helicopter sat there all nice and clean. He was very organized.’ Cooper, like Chas Mortimer, had known Sheene long before he started racing and was happy to help Frank’s boy in any way he could. ‘We used to help each other out, lending each other bikes and stuff; you know, we were just friends really. But he didn’t need much steering because he always had the makings of being the right man for the job, and that was apparent even in the early days.’

After such a disappointing year in 1972, Sheene was most definitely back. Readers of MCN recognized his achievements by voting him their Man of the Year for the first of five times in his career – a record that stood for almost two decades until Carl Fogarty accepted the award for a sixth time in 1999. Moreover, Sheene’s F750 victory was enough to convince Suzuki that he deserved a ride on their all-new RG500. The four-cylinder, 500cc Grand Prix weapon was to become a racing legend in its own right, winning four world titles between 1976 and 1982, but in those early days it was an absolute beast to ride, all power and no handling. When Sheene first tested the bike in Japan at the end of 1973, he found, like everyone else who had ridden it, that the bike had a nasty habit of weaving viciously at speed and pulling wheelies under power, but it was still the fastest bike he’d ever ridden and he proved it by knocking one and a half seconds off the Ryuyo track record in tests.

The plan for 1974 was not only to defend his Formula 750 title but, more importantly, to contest every round of the ultimate motorcycle series – the 500cc Grand Prix World Championship. It would be Sheene’s first ever year in the premier class and he knew the RG500 was up to winning races once the handling was sorted out. But that was easier said than done, and 1974 was to prove a tough baptism for Sheene. The gremlins in the RG’s handling were never truly rooted out that season, and the bike was further plagued by mechanical faults, as most new machines are. Gearboxes and drive shafts were particularly prone to breaking, and Barry had his fair share of crashes, which only added to his problems.

The first outing for the bike was in March at the Daytona 200 race in Florida. It was Barry’s first time there as well as the Suzuki’s, and that meeting inadvertently led to Sheene adopting the now famous number seven. As he told me during an interview for Two Wheels Only magazine, ‘Seven was always my favourite number even as a kid. I’d want seven this or seven that. Then, when I went to Daytona in 1974, I asked what numbers were available. The Americans usually give new riders really high numbers, but Mert Lawill had retired so seven was available. I was well chuffed.’ The lucky number seven wasn’t the only thing Sheene took away from the States. He also latched on to the American habit of displaying the number for all to see while brightening up his racing attire, too. ‘The Americans made you wear your number on your helmet and leathers too, which was even better, and I kept the look when I got back to Europe afterwards.’

It was just as well that Barry brought something away from Daytona because ignition trouble ruined his chances of getting a result in the race. After that, a fine second place in the first Grand Prix of the year proved to be a false indicator of what to expect. Along with most of the other riders, Sheene sat out the German race in protest at the lack of straw bales surrounding the course, then finished third in Austria after suffering the humiliation of being lapped by Giacomo Agostini and Gianfranco Bonera. Four consecutive non-finishes followed for the fast but fickle Suzuki, and a fourth place in the final Czech round was little consolation for a bitterly disappointing 500cc GP debut season in which Sheene had managed to finish only sixth overall. The defence of his Formula 750 title had been a bit of a wash-out too; Barry hadn’t really had time to concentrate on that series as well as the Grands Prix and had had to give second best to the new, super-fast Yamahas. There were brighter moments, though, like scoring the RG500’s debut win at the British Grand Prix, even though it was a non-championship event and as such shouldn’t really have been called a Grand Prix at all. Barry also won the Mallory Park Race of the Year as well as the Motor Cycle News Superbike Championship and the Shell Oils 500 title, salvaging some home pride after a difficult year.

Suzuki were extremely disheartened, though, and ready to throw in the towel with the RG500 project until Sheene insisted on spending five gruelling weeks in Japan working on the bike to turn it into a winner. By the time he was through, Sheene was convinced he could challenge for the 1975 World Championship. But first there was the Daytona 200 to think about, and this time it would make him an international superstar – for all the wrong reasons.

CHAPTER 3 PLAYBOY

‘Two women sharing my bed was old hat as far as I was concerned.’

It’s fair to say that there is no long-standing tradition of motorcycle racers being pin-ups, heart-throbs, playboys or style gurus, but Barry Sheene was all of these things and a whole lot more, besides being a phenomenally successful racer. Ever since his first sexual dalliance over a pool table in the crypt of a London church, Barry never left anyone in any doubt about his sexual orientations. Certainly wealth, fame and the perceived glamour of his chosen profession helped considerably in his conquests of the opposite sex, but his boyish good looks and easy charm were already in place long before any material success.

Sheene was born with a natural blond streak in his otherwise brown hair which, he claimed, was a result of his mother having received a nasty shock during pregnancy when a child walked out in front of her car. According to Sheene, who presumably got the story from his mother, the incident was enough to leave a birthmark on his head which in turn caused the blond streak to grow from it; he related this story many times to prove he was not dyeing it and hence ‘not turning into a pouffo’. It seems Sheene was destined to stand out from the crowd even before he was born. Blond streak aside, the long, flowing locks were all his own doing, together with overgrown sideburns a fashion ‘must’ in the seventies. ‘Having your hair cut in the seventies,’ he observed, ‘was like having your legs amputated. It just wasn’t on.’

Sheene was not built like an athlete, but his frame seemed to serve him well enough when it came to the fairer sex, and what he lacked in the Adonis physique stakes he more than made up for with his ready wit and devil-may-care attitude. In 1973, his looks were deemed worthy of an appearance in Vogue magazine, an accolade of which no bike racer before or since can boast. The man behind the lens was none other than David Bailey, one of England’s most celebrated photographers, more used to working with Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Salvador Dali and Jack Nicholson than with motorcycle racers. The Vogue job wasn’t Sheene’s only modelling stint, either; his other assignments included posing in a pair of underpants alongside a semi-naked woman in the Sun – again, not the most traditional extra-curricular activity for a bike racer, a point that was not lost on Sheene. ‘I reckon I finally destroyed the popular concept of a biker when I was pictured in the Sun. This wasn’t quite what traditional bike enthusiasts had come to expect, but I’m sure it helped to undermine the myth that all those who rode motorcycles are dumb, dirty and definitely undesirable.’ Sheene even went on to have his own weekly column in the Sun in the seventies, which gave him a much coveted mouthpiece in the country’s biggest-selling newspaper.

Image was always important for Sheene, and his greatest role model was Bill Ivy, whom he had known and admired since childhood, as he admitted in an interview for Duke Video in 1993. ‘I suppose one of the biggest influences when I’d just started racing was Bill Ivy because [he] used to race for my dad and was a good mate of mine and I loved his lifestyle. I mean, he was always surrounded by crumpet, all young ladies. I suppose I sort of modelled myself on Bill in that he always used to dress the way he pleased and his lifestyle was a lot of fun, and the woman side of it was the bit I envied the most.’ Sheene’s former rival Mick Grant witnessed Barry’s dealings with the media first-hand and reckoned he played up this playboy image. ‘He was just very good with the media. He was probably better with the media than he was at riding, and he was okay at riding.’

Anything Barry did to improve his own personal standing and image usually seemed to have a positive effect on motorcycle racing in general. He might have had to get rid of the saucy patches he wore on his leathers (‘Happiness is a tight pussy’; ‘I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse’) once he became famous, but he was still capable of attracting attention to himself as a rider. White leathers when most others wore black, the colourful Donald Duck motif on the helmet, the gimmick of making a victory V sign whenever he won a race (which signified victory to the spectators while appearing as something very different to the riders behind him), a caravan to take girls back to rather than an oil-stained van – all these things helped Barry’s personal pulling power as well as the overall image of the sport.

The caravan was introduced during the 1971 season, and while Sheene himself claimed to have bought it on hire purchase, his brother-in-law Paul Smart said that Barry ‘blew half his money on it’. However it was paid for, it was money well spent, as Smart explained: ‘The only thing he was world champion at was sex. In every country, there used to be a hell of a competition for the girls in the paddock. Barry won, of course. The thing is, he’d never give up. He could have three blow-outs but he’d just keep going until he scored. The caravan body eventually fell off the chassis.’ Years later, Sheene admitted this to me, and the caravan falling apart led to another problem, as he explained. ‘As I was welding [the chassis] I lost the St Christopher my mum and dad had given me for luck. At the very next race [the 1972 Imola GP], my bike seized, threw me up the road and punctured my stomach, so my mum and dad bought me another St Christopher.’

The more polished Barry’s image became, the more ‘crumpet’ he could pull. Sheene’s first serious girlfriend was Lesley Shepherd, whom he met in 1967 when he was just 17. They dated for the next seven years but split in 1974 after a relationship which, by Barry’s own admission, was not quite monogamous. He openly confessed to seeing other girls during his foreign travels of the period, some of whom he’d met on the dancefloor. Like most youngsters who lived through the seventies, Barry Sheene loved his disco dancing. It wasn’t so much for the physical benefits that could be gained from all that strutting under a sparkling glitter ball as the fact that it was an easy way to meet girls – and when it came to that Sheene never missed a trick. When he was recuperating from injuries sustained at Mallory Park and aggravated later at Cadwell Park in 1975, the biggest frustration for Sheene wasn’t his inability to ride a bike, it was not being able to dance: ‘[My] inability to get on that dancefloor made me even more determined to get back to peak fitness as quickly as was humanly possible.’

As usual, Sheene only wanted the best and most exclusive when it came to nightclubs, and his annual membership of Tramp near Trafalgar Square was, as far as he was concerned, £30 well spent. There he could mix with fellow celebrities and, naturally, a bevy of gorgeous models. Barry was never shy about boasting of his female conquests, once professing to be every bit George Best’s equal when it came to hitting it off with top models – and in the seventies when he was at his peak, keeping up with Best was no mean feat. The evidence would certainly seem to support Barry’s claim when one considers that it wasn’t unusual for him to have three women on the go at any one time; he often had to juggle them around to avoid potentially embarrassing double-bookings on the same night. ‘As far as women went,’ he said, ‘I was the man for all seasons. A different girl each night was my regular pattern. There were even weeks when I would be saying goodbye to one young lady, immediately chatting another up on the phone and eyeing the clock to see how soon the third would be arriving.’ Of course, sometimes the double-bookings were intentional. ‘I had tried everything that I had read about and a whole lot more besides. Two women sharing my bed was old hat as far as I was concerned.’ Even when he was fit enough to be at a race track rather than recuperating from injury, Sheene, unlike many other top sportsmen, refused to observe the energy-saving, no-sex rule on the evening or morning before an event. If Barry felt like ‘getting his leg over’, an inconvenience like a motorcycle race wasn’t going to stop him.

During his recovery period in 1975, Sheene found that he had a lot of spare time on his hands, and the most natural way he could think of to fill it was to chase girls. The fact that at the time he was sharing the London home of his great friend and aristocratic socialite Piers Weld Forrester, who was probably most famous for his association with Princess Anne before her marriage to Captain Mark Phillips, made for rich pickings on the female front. Forrester and Sheene received countless invitations to high-society parties and Sheene confessed that the women he met were major contributors to his recuperation process. ‘My favourite part of the rehabilitation process was trying to bed as many women as possible,’ he said. Chas Mortimer, himself the product of a public-school education, admired the way Sheene was able to break down social barriers and become accepted by the aristocracy. ‘There were quite a few people from the aristocracy in those days who used to be associated with racing. Barry would always be up at the Piers Forrester parties in London and he was a great one for hob-nobbing with the landed gentry, and you know what the landed gentry are like when they meet a cockney who appeals to them. All of a sudden, like Michael Caine in the film world, you become socially acceptable, whereas in other spheres of life cockney-ism might not be acceptable for them. Motorcycling tended to be a working-man’s sport and car racing tended to be the landed gentry’s kind of sport. Barry was able to transcend the social barriers, which are very strong in the UK, stronger than anywhere else in the world probably.’

Forrester’s death during a minor bike race at Brands Hatch in 1977 devastated Barry; it was yet another reminder of how dangerous motorcycle racing was in the seventies. According to Mortimer, the dangers of the sport even affected how close some riders got to one another. ‘Barry and I have always got on quite well together, but we were never the best of buddies. We were from the same generation and it was difficult in those days because a lot of people were getting killed and you didn’t want to make too much of a mate of someone in case they got wiped out.’

During the same recovery period, Barry also treated himself to the ultimate status symbol: a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow complete with personalized registration plate, 4 BSR. Racing rival Phil Read already had one, which might have been reason enough for Sheene to follow suit, but he always claimed he was swayed by Rolls Royce’s reputation for reliability than by the status-symbol trip. The only probable reason Barry didn’t buy a Roller any earlier than he did was because he’d lost his driving licence for 18 months for drink driving. By his own admission he’d had ‘a few rounds of drinks’ in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, with a friend before being involved in an accident while driving home. Barry claimed he got slivers of glass in his eyes from the collision and went straight home to rinse them out, only to find a police car awaiting him. Barry later appeared at King’s Lynn Crown Court protesting that he had fully intended to call the police to report the incident as soon as he had washed the glass out of his eyes, but his licence was suspended for a year with another six months added on as part of the points totting-up system (he already had various other minor offences on his licence). Sheene was also required to take another driving test in order to regain his licence, which he eventually did, but for one and a half years he needed to be driven everywhere he went, except on the Continent, where he drove himself.

The King’s Lynn incident wasn’t the only occasion when Barry found himself with a spot of car trouble. He very nearly drowned after some hire-car antics in Italy in 1974 went overboard – quite literally. Sheene was fooling around in the Fiat with fellow racers Kenny Roberts and Gene Romero, experimenting with a somewhat unorthodox driving method: Roberts took the wheel, Romero operated the foot pedals and Sheene applied liberal and erratic doses of handbrake at his leisure. The result was predictable, even if the location was a little unusual: the trio ended up in a canal, the Fiat turned upside down and sinking fast. Romero got out relatively easily but Barry was temporarily snagged up in the very handbrake he had so recently been abusing. He, too, eventually got out, but he still had to rescue Roberts who was calling for help, trapped in the quickly submerging vehicle.

On another occasion, again in Imola, Sheene parked his hire car in the town square unaware that the market was due to take place the following morning. When he returned to the car he found stalls all around it, one in particular utilizing the bonnet. Oblivious to the jeers of the traders who were convinced that Sheene was going nowhere until the market was over, Barry simply climbed into the car, floored the accelerator and smashed through the stalls. Dumbfounded pedestrians could well have been forgiven for thinking a James Bond movie was being filmed in their home town. After all, the two did have a certain number in common.

Sheene’s laddish behaviour might have continued unchecked, but his womanizing days came to an abrupt end in late 1975 when he met Stephanie McLean, a 22-year-old glamour model, former Playboy bunny girl and star of the classic Old Spice surfing advert. Stephanie was at the time married to top glamour photographer Clive McLean, with whom she had a five-year-old son, Roman. Such was Sheene’s standing as a national celebrity in early 1976 that a picture of him stepping out on town with Stephanie made the front page of the Sun – a somewhat dubious honour reserved for ‘class A’ celebrities and a sure sign that Barry was now a household name, in Britain at least.

Barry first met Stephanie at Tramp while he was still on crutches. She had seen the Thames Television documentary surrounding his Daytona crash and asked to borrow his leathers for an October modelling assignment which Sheene himself attended. He was instantly smitten with Stephanie and appeared to give up his womanizing almost overnight, even if such a drastic change of lifestyle threatened his image. ‘I couldn’t give a monkeys about the bachelor playboy image being ruined,’ he said. ‘The image was only there because that’s what I was like.’ Sheene later admitted that settling down to a one-woman relationship wasn’t as difficult as he thought, although his very words seemed tinted with an air of nostalgia for good times past. ‘With a massive list of conquests behind me, I knew I had completed all the running around I had ever wanted,’ he said. ‘Since settling down to a steady relationship with Steph, I have never once yearned for those wild times: the days of the paddock groupies; the passionate notes waiting for me when I returned to hotels after a race; the women who simply wanted to experience sex with a celebrity. All that is behind me now.’

Meeting Steph might have marked the end of Sheene’s direct involvement with other women, but it certainly didn’t stop other girls swooning over him, or even rowing over him. At Cadwell Park in 1976, two girls had a stand-up fight outside Barry’s caravan as they fought to get near him for his autograph, and on another occasion a girl approached Barry wielding a pair of scissors in a desperate attempt to snatch a lock of his hair. It was the kind of behaviour previously reserved for rock stars, and it prompted the media to refer to Sheene as a rock star on a bike.

Barry certainly lived up to the tag in 1979 while staying in a five-star hotel before that year’s French Grand Prix. Trying to get a good night’s sleep before the race, Barry became increasingly annoyed with the band playing at full volume downstairs. When a phone call to the manager had no effect, in protest Barry emptied the contents of his mini-bar over the balcony near where the band was playing, but again to no avail. When another call to the manager failed to subdue the noise, Sheene performed the classic rock star attention-grabber: the 26-inch colour television was lobbed out of the window and it shattered into a million pieces, loudly enough to be heard over and above the offending band. They stopped playing straight away and Barry got his peaceful night’s sleep. In fact, he got more than that. Upon returning to the hotel after the race, he found that a new television had been placed in the room along with an ice bucket and two bottles of champagne by way of apology on the management’s behalf for permitting so much noise at the dance.

Despite his attachment to Stephanie, Barry’s eye for the ladies did not go unnoticed by the organizers of the 1977 Miss World competition. In an era when the contest was a worldwide must-see television event, Barry was asked to cast his expert eye over the contestants. After Mary Stavin (who would later date the aforementioned George Best) won the event, the press asked Barry to dance with her while they took some pictures. Stephanie at that point promptly left the building, leading observers to believe she was in a jealous rage and had stormed out on Barry. According to Sheene, however, Steph was just tired of all the media attention and had decided to leave for a bit of peace and quiet. The press didn’t buy it, but either way it meant more mainstream publicity for Barry as most major newspapers ran a story on the incident the following day.

As infatuated as Sheene was with Steph, and as much as he claimed to have ‘retired’ from his sexually rapacious lifestyle, he still found it impossible to let go of his bachelor status when push came to shove in 1976. Speaking to Thames Video in 1990 for The Barry Sheene Story, he explained, ‘We were due to get married in 1976 and everything was planned. We were living in Putney, and three days before we were due to get married I was lying in bed that night and I thought, “I can’t get married. I’m scared to death of getting married, I really can’t.” I said to Steph, “Look, I can’t get married. I can’t do it. I love you, I adore you, you’re the best thing since sliced bread, but I don’t want to get married.” Obviously for Steph it was quite upsetting, you know, because she thought, “Oh, Christ, what’s going to happen now? I’ve split up with my husband, got a divorce, and now he doesn’t want to marry me.” You know, why wouldn’t I want to marry her? Obviously [it looked like I] didn’t want to be with her but that wasn’t the truth, I was just scared to death of getting married. So it was a bit of an uneasy period for the next couple of months.’

Sheene did remarkably well to keep this story from the press at the time; it would have been the celebrity marriage of the year had he been able to go through with it. But he still had Steph to deal with in what must have been an uncomfortable situation. ‘Steph took it really fantastically well,’ Sheene continued, ‘there’s no two ways about that, and so after a few years it was all forgotten and we agreed to get married when we wanted children. At the end of 1983 we were talking, and I always intended to give up racing at the end of 1985, so I said, “What we should do is, we could get married now, start to try and have children, that’d be really nice.” So we organized to get married on 16 February 1984 and then we started [trying to have children]. Steph had gone off the pill sort of three months beforehand, and we thought, “Right, we’ll start trying for kids now,” and the very first time we did it without protection she fell pregnant and Sidonie was born nine months and three days after we got married.’

After Sheene fell for Stephanie, a new passion for flying helicopters filled the women-chasing void. He might not have been any good at school, but Barry displayed his potential for learning by sitting and passing his helicopter pilot’s licence with ease and in record time – just three weeks. The instructors at the flying school said it couldn’t be done in that timeframe, but Sheene insisted it had to be because that was all the time his hectic schedule would allow. Barry passed his final exam on the very last day of his three-week course in the winter of 1980–81.

Today, many motorcycle racers – Mick Doohan and Jim Moodie, to name just a couple – fly helicopters, but back in 1981 Sheene was, as usual, the first. For anyone used to handling a motorcycle at 180mph, learning the physical aspects of flying helicopters appears to be relatively easy, but what was outstanding about Sheene getting his licence was that he managed to apply himself to studying for and passing all the written examinations. Just as he had demonstrated with languages, Sheene proved once again that it wasn’t a lack of aptitude for learning that had kept him back at school, it was simply because he didn’t want to be there. The late Steve Hislop, eleven times TT winner and twice British Superbike champion cast some light on the scale of Sheene’s achievement. ‘You have to be very committed with your studying if you want to fly a helicopter as you have to sit exams in air law, navigation, meteorology and all sorts of technical stuff like flight performance, planning and human performance. And you also have to type-rate for different kinds of helicopters [like passing another driving test every time you change car]. I know that Barry has flown Enstroms, Jet Rangers, Agustas and Hughes 500s, so he would have needed to type-rate for each one.’ Just months after being interviewed for this book Steve Hislop was tragically killed when the helicopter he was piloting crashed near his home town of Hawick on July 30, 2003.

Sheene had previously owned a Piper Aztec aeroplane, a light, twin-engined six-seater which he often hired out for charter work to earn some extra cash, but he sold it in 1982. Having found light aeroplanes unpractical for flying to race tracks where there is not always enough room to land, Sheene bought himself an Enstrom 280 Turbo three-seater helicopter capable of almost 120mph. He singlehandedly set the trend for turning up at bike meetings from the air, thus avoiding the queues, cutting down on travel time and further enhancing his image while he was at it. There was another practical side to buying a helicopter, as Sheene explained to Thames Video. ‘I spent money on cars, which was a total waste of bloody time. At one time I had a bloody Rolls Royce, a 500 Mercedes, a 928 Porsche. I walked outside one day and thought, “What on earth do I want this for?” So by the next day I’d got rid of two of them and I bought a helicopter. The helicopter was something that enabled me to do five or six things in a day, and it was productive because in a week I’d be doing 30 things that I got paid for so it was something that earned itself a living.’

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