VOLUME 56 ISSUE 44 NOVEMBER 5, 2019 P79
(Left) Didier de
Radigues hard
at work in 1986.
He scored eight
top 10 finishes
in the 12 500cc
GP races. (Right)
Olivier Rietsch,
better known as
'Gull,' with his
pride and joy.
1983 MARKS THE TURNING POINT
Despite his brother's death, Alain Chevallier con-
tinued to build and race motorcycles. In 1982,
Belgium's Didier de Radiguès rode a Chevallier
Yamaha to victory in the 350cc Yugoslavian GP, to
wind up second in the World Championship. Team-
mate Eric Saul won the Austrian GP and finished
the championship in fourth. For 1983, now with
ELF sponsorship, Didier was joined in the 250GP
Chevallier team by Jean-François Baldé, and the
dream result of the first race at Kyalami saw victory
on his Chevallier debut for the Frenchman, with de
Radiguès second. But Baldé broke his leg at As-
sen, and despite pleasing his local Johnson ciga-
rette sponsors with victory in the Belgian GP at Spa,
Didier could only finish third in the World Cham-
pionship, behind Yamaha factory riders Carlos
Lavado and Christian Sarron. "We had an excel-
lent season with lots of pole positions and fewer
crashes, but we just didn't quite have enough to
win the title," Alain once told me. "But for 1984,
we started a new adventure."
Indeed so—for with the demise of the 350cc
class, and already accustomed to racing in two
grueling GP races in a single day, alongside his
250GP ride in 1983 Didier de Radiguès had be-
gun a 500GP career with a stock Honda RS500,
one of 32 customer replicas of the NS500 triple
Freddie Spencer had turned into a 1982 GP win-
ner. But the Honda's flawed handling was a disap-
pointment, so for 1984, Didier convinced Alain
Chevallier to move up to the 500cc class with an
all-new bike using the Honda RS500 V3 engine,
with sponsorship from ELF and Johnson, and a
backup bike for Christian Le Liard.
