How Grand Prix racing has changed

It was a brilliant MotoGP round in Silverstone this weekend. Tom and I had talked about going, but we delayed a decision to see what the weather would be like and then I discovered that ticket prices were £80 each (without a grandstand seat).

The weather forecast wasn't too bad as it turned out, but the £80 ticket put us off.

In Moto2, Scott Redding rode a terrific race, including a real last-lap battle with Marc Marquez to take second place, Bradley Smith has his best finish of the season in seventh. In MotoGP, Cal Crutchlow had crashed in qualifying warm-up on Saturday and had broken his left ankle. There was a big doubt that he'd ride, but he did so and, after starting from the back of the grid having missed qualifying, he managed to come right through the field to take sixth place (one of the all-time gutsy rides).

Finally, Danny Kent was well in contention in Moto3 and finished sixth.

On Saturday morning, I'd been reading Classic Bike, catching up on some older editions that I'd not read. In the March edition, there was a very good article by Mike Nicks about grand prix racing in the 1960s, focusing on former racer Ollie Howe's experiences.

On MotoGP weekend, it made an interesting read and highlighted the contrasts between today's championship and 50 years ago. It's not only the name - MotoGP - that's changed.

This is the article in full. I scanned it, saved as a PDF and ran it through an OCR programme, so apologies if there are any odd characters:

Article by Mike Nicks from Classic Bike March 2012 edition

Ollie Howe in the 1960s - looking
like Max Biaggi's dad

"I’ll show you something," Ollie Howe says, beckoning me towards the door of his lounge. He leads the way into the kitchen and opens a cupboard. There, looking incongruous in this domestic environment, hangs a primitive set of leathers, black (in those days all leathers were black) with thin reinforcements at elbows and knees, no back protector, not even a maker's label inside the neck. A fading card inside a transparent plastic holder shows Ollie's blood group.

"They were made by a little old boy in Lancashire called Frank Barker, who made leathers and boots for most of the riders in the '50s and '60s," Ollie remembers. "He used to work in a room at the back of his house. I got those from him in 1965. They've got a few patches now."

How many? I ask. "Two, three, four - there's another little one there, six ... " Ollie stops counting at 14. He wore those leathers through five seasons of racing from 1965-69, on a brace of 350 and 500cc Manx Nortons, in what was known as the "Continental Circus".

In the 1950s and 1960s every motorcycle fan fantasised about joining the Continental Circus. There was no Easyjet-to-everywhere then, people endured damp holidays in Britain, food was meat and-two-veg and when you got home you ate tea, not dinner. So the image of a world where people frolicked in the sun in swimsuits, drank wine with exotic food and enjoyed the allegedly easy virtue of Continental women, while racing Manx Nortons, Matchless G50s and AJS 7Rs at the weekend, was the stuff of dreams.

"The Continental Circus was a hard core of 20 to 30 people who toured from country to country, circuit to circuit, racing, putting on a show," Ollie explains. "Precarious? Yes, in every sense of the word. There was no guarantee you would live another week, no guarantee you would get paid or even survive. But it was a group of young people doing what they loved best and having opportunities that 99 per cent of the population didn't have."

They were vagabonds; racing for food, living for the moment, out of contact with home for long periods (no e-mail, mobiles or Facebook then). It was the epitome of existential and hedonistic living: every petrol-head wanted to be there, but only a few had the guts to do it.

"In 1954 1 was doing my National Service in the RAF at Hullavington, in Wiltshire, close to Castle Combe circuit," Ollie says. "I had a 350cc BSA B31 and went to the track to take a look. Someone was going around on a Manx Norton, and my friend said, 'that's John Surtees.'

"Surtees was tyre-testing with Avon, and you could hear this Manx all around the circuit. He had a beautiful style, sweeping through the bends, and I thought, 'I'd like to do that.' I started racing on a BSA Gold Star in 1961 after I'd emigrated to Canada."

Back in England Ollie decided to join the Continental Circus. "Start money ranged from £25 a race, so with two bikes you had fifty quid. probably £100 once you got a bit known," he remembers. "Prize-money usually only went to the first three. but if you got into the first three you walked away with another £50 or £100."

Fifty pounds sounds a pitiful sum for maintaining two racing motorcycles and paying for travel and for two people if a rider's wife or girlfriend was with him to live on, So how did they manage? "Quite easily, actually," Ollie says. "We used to get free fuel at the bigger meetings when the oil companies turned up. And it was the same fuel that you ran in your van, so we would scrounge enough to get us to the next meeting. We had no accommodation expenses because we lived in the van or in a caravan, If you did the Grands Prix you could get free tyres from Dunlop, and a rear would last four or five meetings. So you can't relate it to today's racing at all."

Ollie remembers Mike Hailwood flinging his 500cc Honda into the trees in a downpour at the 1967 Finnish GP, while Agostini won on the MV, from John Hartle on a Matchless G50 and Billie Nelson (who was killed at Opatija in Yugoslavia in 1974) on a Manx Norton.

"Many riders pulled in because of the conditions, but I finished about tenth," Ollie says. "The organisers said 'you carried on' and paid me double. I probably made £100 that weekend."

Ollie also rode in hillclimbs on courses much longer than Britain's 1,000-yarders because they paid pretty good money.

"They were dangerous, because you only got two practice runs, yet Mont Ventoux

in France was about 14 miles long and had hundreds of corners.

"In my first year I travelled on my own, with everything packed into a Ford Thames van," he says. "In the second year I took my wife Bobbie (who died of cancer a few years ago), so I had a caravan. It was a 14-footer with just beds and a cooker. There was no shower, toilet or heating."

A Thames van was almost ubiquitous transport for racers in the 1960s. It had a 1700cc engine and just 5.1 square metres of space. Racers could four-wheel-drift corners at 70mph on public roads in a Thames loaded with bikes and kit in a way that would summon screaming sirens these days, but towing a caravan limited them to 50mph plods around Europe.

Tool- and die-maker Ollie worked in England in winter and fettled his bikes for a new season.

"Most people started the season at Le Mans in April and finished at the end of September, when you might get a couple of rides in Eastern-bloc countries," Ollie says. "We'd get a meeting just about every weekend, so that meant about 25 events in a year. At Easter we managed to do two meetings, one at Tubbergen (5.5 miles) in Holland and the other at Chimay (6.5 miles) in Belgium, four or five hours away.

"You'd practice in Holland on the Friday, dash to Chimay for practice and racing on

the Saturday, then dash back to Holland to race on the Sunday."

Travel arrangements could be Bohemian: "In 1967 we drove 1,500 miles from the

Freiburg hillclimb in Bavaria to the Finnish GP at Imatra the following weekend. We

'came by' a 45-gallon drum of petrol and put it in the back of one of the vans. We

left the women and the caravans in a campsite at Hanover, threw the bikes - three Manxes, a 250 Bultaco and an early 250cc Kawasaki racer - in the back of Eric Hinton's van, and drove to Kiel in north Germany, then got ferries to Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

"Eric was a clever man who had quick bikes, but he lived in a mess. He travelled with his wife and two children, and the van was packed with junk. Toys and tents were chucked in the back, and underneath it you'd find an engine or a box of spares."

Circus runners were always looking for ways to cut costs: "There were five of us in the van, but at ferry crossings two of us would bury ourselves under the junk so we only had to buy three tickets."

Ollie on the Manx Norton riding the Curva Grande
at Monza in the Italian Grand Prix

Ollie looks at a photo hanging on his wall of himself on his 500 Manx in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in 1967. "That was the Curva Grande, a long right-hander," he reflects. "You had to work on it to get through there flat-out at about 140mph on the 500. I used to ask myself, 'Will you have the balls to go round it chin-on-the-tank?' One year Rex Butcher was right behind me and Mike Hailwood rode round the outside of us on the Honda four, wriggling and shaking all over the place. That Honda was so hairy."

The circuits in those days were killers. Today Brno (3.36 miles) in the Czech Republic is like any other Grand Prix circuit - wide and safe. But in those days (8.66 miles), there was a section where there was a rock face on one side of the road and railings on the other.

"At the East German Grand Prix at the Sachsenring (now 2.28 miles, then 5.35), there was a row of bricks round the inside of some corners. We kept the wheels away from them because they were like cobblestones. At Opatija (3.7 miles) in Yugoslavia I was scraping my head on a rock face. At Spa (now 4.3 miles, then 8.76) there were telegraph poles protected by a straw bale where you were doing 150mph. At Assen (now 2.8 miles, then 4.79) in the Netherlands the road was cambered each side and lined by ditches. Every circuit was a mini Isle of Man."

At Imatra in Finland in 1967 Ollie was dicing with John Cooper, but went into a slow corner too fast. "I took the slip road, but it was a gravel track and they'd put a barrier across it, so I had to grab the front brake at 60mph, go down on the gravel, and slide under the barrier.

"At Mettet (4.99 miles) in Belgium in 1967 I was nearly involved in the biggest crash I ever experienced. I was third behind Tom Dickie, who was leading, and John Hartle, when I noticed a rider stationary on the outside of a long left-hander. I'm behind Hartle, looking at his back, and I felt a brush on my right leg. When I came around the next time there was chaos. A French rider on a Metisse had ploughed into the guy on the outside.

"This was 120mph stuff, the crash snapped the front end right off, and the bike flew into the crowd. A spectator was killed. There were only straw bales between the track and the crowd. The two riders were killed, and behind us an English rider, John Denty, careered into the carnage and died a week later.

"They slowed us, but never stopped the race, and when I finished there was blood all over my fairing. John Blanchard won that race, from Tom and John and me."

In his photos Ollie is wearing a Bell J-style helmet: "I never wore a pudding basin because they killed more people than they saved," he claims. "They had a had a band right round the rim, and that's what damaged the head. At Le Mans on the bottom-gear right-hander at the end of the Mulsanne Straight, a rider fell in front of me, banged his head in a simple fall and died. I remember at Wunstorf in Germany, a Dutch guy came off, banged his head, got up and staggered off the circuit, but died of head injuries afterwards."

Attitudes to safety were primitive in other ways too: "In Austria I was practising on my 500 Manx, and there was a Dutch guy on a 50cc bike in the same session. I even saw sidecars and solos out in the same session in Germany."

Given the dangers of the circuits, riders had to crash less in order to stay alive.

"I reckoned to fall off about three times year," Ollie says. Valentino Rossi suffered a personal record of 12 crashes in 2011 on his Ducati Desmosedici in MotoGP, but normally falls only four or five times per season. The Czech MotoGP rider Karel Abraham lobbed it an incredible 22 times last year, the Brit newcomer Cal

Crutchlow went down 12 times, and even world champion Casey Stoner stepped off on seven occasions.

"I was fortunate. The worst injury I had on the Continent was when I gashed my left leg in the 1968 Czech GP at Brno. It was raining and I was following Jack Findlay, who was about fifth. I'd been missing this manhole cover, but on one lap, I ran over it, hit the kerb and felt an incredible impact on my left leg. They laid me on a stretcher and took me into the hallway of a cottage. I was lying there dazed, with blood pouring out of my leg, until the end of the race. Bobbie went to the organiser to ask where I was, and he said 'he's kaput!' She said 'you mean he's dead?' The guy just repeated 'kaput!'

"An ambulance took me to the medical centre where they cleaned me up and stitched me. Bobbie went to collect the start money, but they said: 'No start money - he didn't finish the race.' Then Phil Read walked in and saw what was happening and five minutes later he handed Bobbie the money."

The Manx was uncomplicated compared to today's multi-adjustable, electronically-

monitored machines and the obsessional quest for the perfect set-up. The Manx was a single-cylinder racing workhorse, built to withstand a life on the road.

"Between races you would clean the bike - the Manx was notorious for chucking oil everywhere, check the tappet clearances and drain the oil. Every winter you would rebuild the engine or send it to a tuner such as Ray Petty. I used to build my own engines, but I gave the crankshaft to Ray to replace the big end. Then halfway through the year you would lift the head and check everything was okay.

"One year at Le Mans a valve dropped on my 350 and mangled the head and valve seats. I thought the engine was wrecked, but at big German meetings they used to have these things, which was a bus turned into a workshop with lathes and milling machines. At the Nurburgring they cleaned up the damage on the head, replaced the valve seats and valves, and Eric Hinton rebuilt the shaft-and-bevel camshaft drive."

Riders weren't cosseted with a rev-limiter, so they were responsible for preserving their bike's engine during a race. "The 500 Manx was red-lined at 7,200rpm and the 350 at 8,500rpm," Ollie says. "When you had the opportunity you took a quick glance at the rev counter, but most of the time you knew what it was revving at by the sound of it.

"If you over-revved the engine you could destroy it, depending on how quickly you

got the clutch in. The valve drops in and immediately breaks the head and the valve

seats, and can damage the cam box and piston and possibly the barrel, because you've got a valve head rattling around inside the barrel. You took things like valves, pistons, big ends and main bearings on the road - anything that would wear out. But I never changed the Girling rear shocks on my 500 Manx in six years! Everyone had the same Dunlop triangular tyres, and you used the same ones in the wet or the dry. That was the same for the works bikes, including the MVs and Hondas.

"The Manx was a very cammy motor - it didn't like anything below 5,000rpm. Hairpin bends were a nightmare because you had to slip the clutch a lot, and when it bit on a wet track it could kick the back wheel away from you. But it was basically a good handling bike and you couldn't do a lot to it anyway to improve it."

Ollie is now 76 and lives with his wife Tressa in Banbury, Oxfordshire.

Having just come back from the Isle of Man, I've had a taste of what racing on road circuits like Spa or Assen would have been like back then and I can remember watching motorcycle racing in the late 1960s when I was a 14/15-year-old, desperate for a motorcycle of my own and riding my racing bike to Oulton Park to watch the racing.

I don't remember Ollie Howe, but names of his contempories - John 'Moon Eyes' Cooper, Phil Read, Mike Hailwood, Bill Ivy - were familiar. Hailwood and Read were most revered of all. We watched at Old Hall Corner at Oulton Park, sitting on the bank with the near 90-degree corner in front of us. We chose to watch there and anyone crashing would plough into the tyre wall and bank in front of us. We felt no sense of danger. Indeed, it was the ability to watch racing at such close quarters, to be able to smell the Castrol R and to feel the impact of the noise of a Manx Norton on your chest cavity, that so impressed me.

Paddocks were always open and you could wander round and watch the bikes being prepared. At bigger meetings - the later Anglo-American series where they raced Triumph Rocket 3 machines - for example, you'd have to buy a paddock pass, but you still had freedom to roam.

Later still, when Tom and I started watching bike racing, the fans were further back, fences started to appear and everything became a little more arm's length. At some tracks - the Bus Stop at Mallory, for example - you could still get very close, but that was the exception rather than the rule.

I think that's why I enjoyed the TT so much. You could get close to the racing. You could walk around the paddock without a pass and see (even talk to) the riders. It's an anachronism in more ways than one, but long may that continue.

See other posts:

Ian Hutchinson - Closer to the Edge

I attend a speed-awareness course

Mad Sunday T-shirts banned

Trip to the TT 2012

Riding vintage motorcycles

The joys of motorcycling